Digital collectionSpanish musical theatre: a selection

• Selection of works
• Structure
• Technical information
• Terms of use
• Legal notice

La Gran Vía. Boceto de decorado de Giorgio Busato y Bernardo Bonardi; libreto de Felipe Pérez y González; música de Federico Chueca y Joaquín Valverde. 1886. Acuarela. 18 x 28 cm. (TRADUCIR)

The collection is part of the Fundación Juan March digital repository and is published as an introduction to Spanish musical theatre based on the holdings kept at the Library of the Fundación, which is particularly rich in contemporary Spanish theatre and music.  The digital publication is divided into seven chapters corresponding to the most important periods in the history of Spanish musical theatre from the end of the 18th century up to the beginning of the 21st, and also has specialised indices and appendices. 

This digital collection has been put together and published with the following aims:

• Disseminating Spanish musical theatre
• Encouraging people to learn about and research Spanish musical theatre
• Introducing a selection of significant works in an attractive virtual environment with unrestricted access to the documents

The collection brings together 525 documents and contains works by 363 creators – composers, librettists, set and costume designers, directors, performers, arrangers, etc. – participants and protagonists in the 154 works, of which a part or the whole is on display here.

The documents illustrating the collection are original sketches and designs, librettos, scores and sound recordings. There has also been a research project transforming a sample of 18th and 19th-century scores into virtual scores and recordings.

Of particular note is the digital retrieval of 108 zarzuela pieces from vinyl discs (78 rpm) recorded between 1920 and 1940, which has consciously respected the needle “noise” and the irregularities which indicate their use and age.

The documents in the digital collection are of varied provenance: private donations (18th-century scores), gifts from the estates of composers and playwrights (Bacarisse, Julio Gómez, Joaquín Turina, Juan Jose Mantecón, Ángel Martín Pompey, and Carlos, Guillermo and Rafael Fernández-Shaw), works derived from the Foundation’s special grants programme and commissions (Cruz de Castro, la Factoría), as well as purchases.

It also offers other related content on the Foundation’s website (learning pages such as Clamor, El Archivo del compositor Joaquín Turina and La Saga de los Fernández-Shaw y el Teatro lírico), links to further resources on librettists, composers and the creators of the sketches referred to, in the general catalogue of the Fundación Library, as well as audio recordings and videos of works performed at the Foundation.

To improve information retrieval, indices have been created enabling users to browse:

• Composers
• Librettists
• Artists
• Works
• Subjects
• Document types

The collection is accompanied by a graphic in the form of a Family Tree Genealogía (PDF, 150 KB) which describes the styles covered by Spanish musical theatre. It was created by Javier Huerta and included in the series of essays on this topic published in the Foundation's Journal. The collection also includes Maps indicating the Madrid theatres where most of the works referred to in the collection were premiered. Lastly, there is an account of work done on a New form of musicological research based on generating virtual scores and the MusicXML markup language.

Selection of works

Structure

The digital collection "Spanish musical theatre" follows the structure of a physical publication, divided into an introduction, chapters, indices and appendices. After a presentation on the main page, the collection therefore continues with the following chapters, each introduced by a brief description:

• Italian opera and Spanish zarzuela
• 19th-century opera
• Modern zarzuela and género bufo
• The género chico
• The golden age of zarzuela
• Opera up to 1950
• Musical theatre and contemporary opera

Each chapter comprises a varying number of digital archives depending on the Library's holdings, the longest chapters being of those on the golden age of the zarzuela (232 objects) and the género chico (111), followed by opera up to 1950 (57), modern zarzuela and género bufo (52), 19th-century opera (34), musical theatre and contemporary opera (28) and lastly Italian opera and Spanish zarzuela (11).

Technical information

The collection “Spanish musical theatre: a selection” is part of the Foundation’s digital repository which as been created from its own holdings and is maintained on open source software tools on the Islandora digital resource management platform.  It contains 28 499 objects, 128 083 relationships between objects and 115 788 datastreams. It consists of 27 691 pages of scores and librettos, 55 382 page images, 2 695 images of sketches, scores, discs and librettos of various sizes, 281 mp3 audio files, 73 MusicXML files and 7 videos.

The project is the result of interdepartmental work by the Library (Paz Fernández, José Luis Maire, Celia Martínez, Luis Martínez-Uribe and Arkaitz Zabalbeitia), the Music Department (Miguel Ángel Marín and Alberto Hernández), the IT Department (Fernando Martínez), the Communications Department (Guillermo Nagore) and the Design and Multimedia Department (Aurelio Medina, José Luis Prieto and Dolores Iglesias). The companies Sonologic (audio digitisation), Arte Digital and Proco (digitisation of paper documents), and the video production company 93 Metros (introductory video) have also worked on the project.

Terms of use

The documents comprising the collection are made publicly available to interested parties and researchers on the basis either that they are in the public domain or that the consent of the authors and/or their successors in title has been obtained.  They can be consulted freely, with due compliance with the intellectual property legislation in force.  They are primarily for use for teaching and research.  Where applicable, please cite this database indicating its provenance and website address.  The Foundation Juan March would be grateful if you would inform it (biblioteca@march.es) of research and studies being carried out using this database as a source, so that those works can be included in its Library's specialised bibliographical collection.

Legal notice

Unrestricted free use of the content of the Spanish musical theatre digital collection implies respectful and proper use of that content. Users may listen to, view and print free of charge only for use in academic research and teaching and provided they cite the provenance and authors of the content. As with all other rights over the Foundation Juan March website, the intellectual property rights relating to this database and the texts and images it contains are protected by Law No 23/2006 of 7 July 2006 amending the consolidated text of the Intellectual Property Law, approved by Royal Legislative Decree No 1/1996 of 12 April 1996. The digital documents are reproduced with restricted resolution and are protected by a watermark which may not be altered.