“Mujeres de fuego”: ritmos “negros”, transgresión y modernidad en el teatro lírico de la Edad de Plata

Abstract

During the “Edad de Plata” (Silver Age), the concept of musical modernity shouldn’t simply be identified with the “new music” certain composers, critics and intellectuals put forth as a way of approaching a European perspective. This article aims to demonstrate that the installation of jazz in the heart of Spanish popular culture during the 1920s and 1930s was merely another symptom of musical and cultural modernity. “Negro rhythms” became part of the incipient mass culture due to the ground the different forms of supposedly “conservative” lyric theatre ceded to it. In order to inquire further into the role of jazz-inspired music in lyric theatre, the libretti and music of a sample of close to fifty works, successfully performed between 1919 and 1936, ranging from the zarzuela grande, to operetta (in one or various acts), sainete, juguete, revue and the género frívolo (literally, “frivolous genre”, including the humorada and historieta in two or three acts), have been examined. The objective was to establish whether or not in Spanish music theatre of the “Edad de Plata”, the fox, charleston, blues, shimmy and one-step are associated with specific situations arising in the drama or particular characters, if they were merely a visual element (with little or no relation to the storyline), a musical metaphor of modern life and whether or not (and in what sense) they helped to redefine the role of women during a period of substantial changes in their social, economic and cultural status.