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Abstract
Pedro Calderón de la Barca marked the birth of Prince Felipe Próspero (1657) with the invention of a new musical-theatrical genre: zarzuela. Entitled El laurel de Apolo, the piece retells Ovid’s myth but with some unexpected additions. Though no music survives, this article reveals how Calderón created a sensorial hierarchy, privileging sound. Surprisingly, the turn toward a sonic rendering of Ovid’s myth may be the result of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. The following essay shows how, together with its loa, sound eclipsed the visual in this zarzuela as a means to comment on circumstances beyond the stage.
Notes
1 I am indebted to Don W. Cruickshank for sharing his edition with me and for clarifying the textual history of the work. For more on a comparison between the different editions, see Everett W. Hesse, ‘The Two Versions of Calderon’s El laurel de Apolo’, Hispanic Review, 14:3 (1946), 213–34. See also Ángel Valbuena-Briones, ‘El tema del laurel de Apolo en Calderón’ in Calderón and the Baroque Tradition, ed. Kurt Levy, Jesús Ara & Gethin Hughes (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier U. P., 1985), 9–22.
2 Louise K. Stein, Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011 [1st ed. 1993]), 263.
3 Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Anthony J. Cascardi, quoted in Margaret Rich Greer, The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderon de la Barca (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1991), 4. For a more positive view of the genre, see Greer, The Play of Power.
4 Stein, Songs of Mortals, 264.
5 The loa was written for the occasion of Próspero’s birth and, together with the myth that follows, was first performed on 4 March 1658. A defective version (cut off in the middle) of this text survives, edited by Sebastián Ventura de Vergara Salcedo and published in the 1664 Tercera parte. Calderón corrected and revised the text for the birthday of Carlos II in 1678. He would have omitted the loa for this occasion since it referred specifically to the birth of Felipe Próspero. Most modern editions are based on this latter version, as preserved by Juan de Vera Tassis in 1687, and thus continue to omit the loa. This essay relies on one of the few modern editions that include the loa together with the full extant two Jornadas: Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tercera parte de comedias, ed., con intro., de D. W. Cruickshank (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio Castro, 2007), 919–95. See also Introduction, xxiv–xxv. All quotations from El laurel de Apolo are taken from this edition and page references will be given parenthetically within the main text.
6 Jonathan Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–18 (p. 2).
7 Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, 2.
8 Ana María Ochoa Gautier, ‘Social Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America’, in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Sterne, 388–404 (p. 391).
9 Ochoa Gautier, ‘Social Transculturation’, 392.
10 Don W. Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2013), 332. Adding a different perspective, Greer notes that the prejudice against Calderón’s court dramas comes from our modern discomfort of the union of power and art. See Greer, The Play of Power, 5.
11 Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón, 73.
12 Margaret Greer, ‘The Development of National Theater’, in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2009 [1st ed. 2004]), 238–51 (p. 250). Other currents of Calderón criticism see his plays as mostly bolstering his royal patrons, expressing ‘not only the collective values of the Spanish people, but those values as filtered through the royal optic. [ … ] Calderón was expected to congratulate monarchs’ (Anthony J. Cascardi, The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005 (1st ed. 1984)], xi–xii).
13 The only modern edition that includes the loa is Don W. Cruickshank’s in his 2007 edition of the Tercera parte de comedias.
14 This difference in verse is also noted by Stein, in her Songs of Mortals, 263.
15 See Real Academia Española, Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), Vol. I (1726), s.v. ‘Alquería'; available online at <http://web.frl.es/DA.html> (accessed 14 June 2021).
16 J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1st ed. 1963]), 321–22.
17 For more on the specific causes and effects of Spain’s disastrous financial situation under Philip IV, see Elliott, Imperial Spain, Chapter 9.
18 Elliott, Imperial Spain, 295.
19 Elliott, Imperial Spain, 294–95.
20 As we saw with the example of Apollo alternating between sung and spoken passages, the term ‘representa’ means spoken. Other playwrights of the period also understood zarzuela to be a mix of singing and speaking. See, for example, Melchor Fernández de León who describes it: ‘Mas con una novedad / que es tan breve su poema, / que no es más que una jornada; / y en ella se representa, / se canta y se baila también’. Quoted in María Asunción Florez, Música teatral en el Madrid de los Austrias durante el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: ICCMU, 2006), 266. I am indebted to María Virginia Acuña for sharing this reference with me.
21 Louise K. Stein and Roger Alier aver that the loa functions to let the audience know what to expect in the piece that follows since it has been a few decades since Calderón composed a musical theatrical work with a pastoral setting. See Louise K. Stein & Roger Alier, ‘Zarzuela’, Grove Music Online, <https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10 .1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040742> (accessed 2 June 2022).
22 For more on Calderón and his use of mythology, see: H. M. Martin, ‘The Apollo and Daphne Myth As Treated by Lope de Vega and Calderón’, Hispanic Review, 1:2 (1933), 149–60; José Manuel Losada Goya, ‘Calderón de La Barca: El laurel de Apolo’, Revista de Literatura, 51:102 (1989), 485–94; and Thomas Austin O’Connor, Myth and Mythology in the Theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (San Antonio: Trinity U. P., 1989).
23 María Belén Molina Jiménez, El teatro musical de Calderón de la Barca: análisis textual (Murcia: Univ. de Murcia, 2008), 311.
24 Don W. Cruickshank, ‘Ut pictura poesis: Calderón’s Picturing of Myth’, in Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque, ed. Isabel Torres (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007), 156–70 (p. 160).
25 Cruickshank states that when ‘sources did not suit Calderón’s artistic purpose, he changed them’ (Don Pedro Calderón, 75). In the notes to his edition, Cruickshank observes that Ovid is one possible source for El laurel de Apolo, together with Lope de Vega’s El amor enamorado, Baltasar de Vitoria’s Teatro de los dioses de la gentilidad, and Philosofia secreta (libro II, cap. xix) of Juan Pérez de Moya. See El laurel de Apolo, in Calderón, Tercera parte, ed. Cruickshank, xxiv–xxv.
26 See Stein & Alier, ‘Zarzuela’. Stein & Alier note that both the tono and the tonada were used in zarzuelas. The terms became synonymous and came to mean a secular song that was not a villancico. See Jack Sage, revised by Álvaro Zaldívar, ‘Tono (i)’, Grove Music Online, <https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10 .1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000028136?rskey=I1YMNe&result=1> (accessed 2 June 2022).
27 Miguel Querol Gavaldá, La música en el teatro de Calderón (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona/Institut del Teatre, 1981), 68.
28 Stein, ‘Zarzuela’.
29 Molina Jiménez, El teatro musical de Calderón de la Barca, 59–60 & 310–24.
30 Stein, ‘Zarzuela’.
31 Christopher Gascón sees music as the key proponent of plot development in a modern adaptation of El laurel de Apolo by New York City’s Repertorio Español (9–19 July 2015), which he reviews in his ‘Musical Agency in Calderón’s El laurel de Apolo’, Hispanófila, 180:1 (2017), 3–20.
32 Stein also understands Apollo’s mixing of singing and speaking as a sign of his weakened state thanks to Cupid’s arrow of love (Songs of Mortals, 266). O’Connor notes that here Apollo’s voice ‘is reduced to common prattle, symbolising the negative effects of lust on his person’ (Myth and Mythology, 122).
33 Gascón also highlights the importance of music in this scene as an indication of the supernatural aspects of Daphne’s metamorphosis (‘Musical Agency’ in Calderón's El laurel de Apolo, 12).
34 As described in the list of characters (‘Personas que hablan en ella’), the character Música refers to ‘Músicos y Acompañamiento’ (918).
35 My reading offers a more negative view of Apollo than that of Julio Vélez-Sainz who sees the god as, ultimately, the perfect courtier. See Julio Vélez-Sainz, ‘Eros, Vates, Imperium: Metamorphosing the Metamorphoses in Mythological Court Theatre (Lope de Vega’s El Amor Enamorado and Calderón’s Laurel de Apolo)’, in Ovid in the Age of Cervantes, ed. Frederick A. de Armas (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2010), 226–41.
36 While the text itself does not designate singing or speaking before Rústico’s verses, mortals spoke in zarzuelas and gods mostly sang. On whether or not recitative was used in this zarzuela, Stein thinks it unlikely given the setting and the way in which recitative was used in Calderón’s semi-operas. See her Songs of Mortals, 267.
37 Greer, The Play of Power, 8–9.
38 David Howes, ‘Introduction: Empire of the Senses’, in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 1–21 (p. 5).
39 Susan Stewart, ‘Remembering the Senses’, in Empire of the Senses, ed. Howes, 59–69.
40 Alexander Vergara, Rubens and His Spanish Patrons (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1999), 125. Scholars once thought the painting was completed by Cornelis de Vos. See Matías Díaz Padrón, ‘Un lienzo de Cornelis de Vos identificado en el Museo del Prado: “Apolo y Dafne”’, Boletín del Museo del Prado, 3 (1982), 87–92. It is now accepted, however, that Apolo persiguiendo a Dafne was completed by Theodoor Van Thulden. See the Prado’s online catalogue: Apolo persiguiendo a Dafne, <https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/apolo-persiguiendo-a-dafne/c6e60b84-6576-4d42-a1d5-b00794d30102> (accessed 14 June 2021). I will continue, however, to refer to the painting as by Rubens throughout the article since I am most concerned with the larger visual conception of the myth (by Rubens), not with the slight variations in technique that show the final execution to be carried out by Van Thulden. To compare the sketch and the painting, see the reproductions in Svetlana Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada (Bruxelles: Arcade Press, 1997), Figures 50 & 51.
41 Vergara, Rubens and His Spanish Patrons, 125.
42 Vergara, Rubens and His Spanish Patrons, 126–27.
43 Vergara, Rubens and His Spanish Patrons, 127.
44 Ángel Valbuena-Briones makes a similar assertion regarding the influence of Rubens’ painting La caída de Faetón on Calderón, stating that ‘en la lista de los cuadros mitológicos, basados en las Metamorphosis, y realizados por [Rubens] y sus ayudantes de taller, figuran motivos que el dramaturgo [Calderón] llevó a escena’ (Ángel Valbuena-Briones, ‘El tema de Apolo en tres comedias de Calderón’, Thesaurus. Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 36:2 [1981], 230–44 [p. 242]).
45 For the full text of Calderón’s deposition in defence of painters, see Edward M. Wilson, ‘El texto de la “Deposición a favor de los profesores de la pintura”, de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca’, Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 77:2 (1974), 709–27. Available at <http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/el-texto-de-la-deposicin-a-favor-de-los-profesores-de-la-pintura-de-don-pedro-caldern-de-la-barca-0/html/02126d9a-82b2-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_23.html#I_0_> (accessed 2 June 2022).
46 Cruickshank, ‘Ut pictura poesis’, 157.
47 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 170.
48 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 78–79.
49 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 80.
50 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 80.
51 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 79–80.
52 Alpers, The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada, 161.
53 Although the Musée Bonnat entitles Rubens’ sketch painting Apollo and Daphne, the title of the work under Rubens’ direction, executed by Theodoor van Thulden, is Apolo persiguiendo a Dafne.
54 There is another musical piece of Calderón’s, El jardín de Falderina, performed in 1648, which some consider to be the first zarzuela, but Calderón did not label it as such and this is a post facto distinction based on its likeness to the clearly labelled zarzuelas that come after it. Moreover, El jardín de Falderina was not performed in the Palacio de la Zarzuela and was probably designated a ‘comedia cantada’ at the time. See Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón, 291.
55 See Stein, Songs of Mortals, 130, n. 18.
56 Susan McClary, ‘Introduction: On Bodies, Affects and Cultural Identities in the Seventeenth Century’, in Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression, ed. Susan McClary (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2013), 3–18 (pp. 3–4).
57 Jacques Attali, Noise (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5–6.
58 R. Murray Schafer, ‘The Soundscape’, in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Sterne, 95–103 (p. 98).
59 As R. Murray Schafer puts it: ‘in the West the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information about the time of the Renaissance, with the development of the printing press and perspective painting’ (‘The Soundscape’, 101).
60 Fernando J. Bouza Álvarez, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain, trans. Sonia López & Michael Agnew, foreword by Roger Chartier (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004 [1st Spanish ed. 2000]), 20.
61 Losada Goya offers a more positive view of Apollo, arguing that he has grown emotionally over the course of the play (Losada Goya, ‘Calderón de la Barca: El laurel de Apolo’, 485–94). Valbuena-Briones also sees the conclusion as a moment in which Apollo learns to control his impulsive desires (Valbuena-Briones, ‘El tema de Apolo’, 236). I find this interpretation unconvincing since it was metamorphosis that prevented the rape of Daphne, not Apollo’s will and self-mastery. I do, however, agree with Valbuena-Briones that the overarching theme of the zarzuela underlines ‘la importancia del triunfo de la razón sobre las pasiones’ (238). Acuña also argues for an interpretation of reason over passion and argues that Calderón’s zarzuela influences a later zarzuela on the same topic. See María Virginia Acuña, ‘Sobbing Cupids, Lamenting Lovers, and Weeping Nymphs in the Early Zarzuela: Calderón de la Barca’s El laurel de Apolo (1657) and Durón and Navas’ Apolo y Dafne (circa 1700)’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 69:2 (2017), 69–95.
62 Aneta Georgievska-Shine & Larry Silver, Rubens, Velázquez, and the King of Spain (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), 6. Georgievska-Shine and Silver expand on the arguments made by Alpers.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.