Among the major musical theatrical events of early 1924 was the opening of André Charlot’s Revue of 1924 on Broadway. The London import focused on its performers and intimate character and included the US debuts of Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie and Jack Buchanan. An Italian version of Madame Pompadour opened in Milan, as did the zarzuela La leyenda del beso (The Legend of the Kiss) in Milan. New musical comedies came to Broadway, and The Three Graces, an operetta adaptation, played in London. The major event, though, was the premiere of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Many of the musicals that opened in 1923 and played into 1924 hearkened back, somewhat nostalgically, for simpler times, though the stories were often fraught with deceit and sometimes could be a bit salacious. The lead female characters in such works ranged from a young waif who ends up travelling with a circus (Poppy) to a Russian empress (Catherine), a royal mistress (Madame Pompadour) and a young Spanish woman who finds herself in a complex labyrinth of romantic entailments (Doña Francisquita).

For over a century, flamenco has been closely associated with productions of Carmen around the world. Bizet’s gypsy protagonist is often depicted as a flamenco performer while it has become commonplace to perceive aspects of flamenco in Bizet’s score. Yet this nexus only developed gradually during the first three decades of the opera’s existence. Bizet was largely unfamiliar with flamenco and composed Carmen while flamenco as we recognise it today was still coalescing in Spain, especially in the flamenco-orientated cafés cantantes of Seville and Madrid. During the Belle Époque the rise of flamenco and its global recognition occurred almost in tandem with Carmen’s establishment in the international operatic repertory. French and Spanish opera singers of this period, from Emma Calvé to Elena Fons and Maria Gay, sought hispanic authenticity for their Carmens by drawing on the Spanish entertainment cultures of Seville, Granada and even Barcelona. The tripartite structure of this chapter employs the conceit of offering different perspectives on the intersection of Carmen and flamenco in the Belle Époque loosely framed around the basic elements of the artform: toque y palos, baile and cante.

What is zarzuela? What is its relation to operetta? If the first question can only be addressed in general terms, the second requires a more complex answer. The development of Spanish-language music theatre has been shaped over four centuries by dialogue with opera on one side and operetta on the other. The influence of external operetta movements on zarzuela ranges from Parisian opéra comique and Offenbach’s opéra bouffe, through the English musical plays of Jones and Monckton to the Viennese ‘silver age’. All these nourished the Spanish genre while (as Nietzsche recognized) extending the concept of operetta. After examining classic género chico works such as Federico Chueca’s La Gran Vía and Ruperto Chapí’s La revoltosa, Christopher Webber highlights the period between 1910 and the early 1920s. In those years lavish opereta español was the fashion in Madrid, notably Pablo Luna’s key work El asombro de Damasco, written with London tastes in mind. A brief coda surveys developments after the Spanish Civil War, notably Pablo Sorozábal’s Black, el payaso. This daring 1942 satire on Francoist rule, masquerading as a homage to Emmerich Kálmán, was one the last works to yoke the societal concerns of romantic zarzuela with operetta.