Abstract
On November 17, 1916, a one-act zarzuela titled La canción del olvido (The Song of Forgetting), with libretto by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, and music by José Serrano, debuted in Valencia’s Teatro Lírico. Originally scheduled to premiere in February 1916 at Madrid’s Teatro Apolo, tensions between Serrano and the Sociedad de Autores Españoles prevented the show from going on and Serrano left for Valencia where, with the help of his compatriot José Navarro, he rented the Trianón cinema, turning it into the Teatro Lírico. Dedicated entirely to representing works from Serrano’s repertoire, the new theater’s first performance was La canción del olvido. The play was an instant success and continued to be performed for a year and a half, traveling to Barcelona, Bilbao, and Zaragoza, before finally premiering in Madrid at the Teatro de la Zarzuela on March 1, 1918. As it had elsewhere, the play met with “huge success” in the Spanish capital and was staged through the end of the theater season (June 15).1
Everyone’s talking about this famous Naples Soldier.
—Ariel, La Vanguardia, September 20, 1918
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Notes
Federico Romero quoted in María Encina Cortizo, Emilio Arrieta: De la ópera a la zarzuela (Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 1998), 379.
Beatriz Echeverri, La gripe española: La pandemia de 1918–1919 (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1993), 84.
Siliceo, “Cotidianas.” La Vanguardia, September 28, 1918.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 24, 5.
Artistically speaking, Bartolozzi’s work is heterogeneous and diverse. He is probably best known for his contributions to theater, especially children’s theater, and illustration. He collaborated with Ramón Gómez de la Serna for almost a decade as illustrator of the latter’s narrative production. See David Vela Cervera, Salvador Bartolozzi (1881–1950): Ilustración gráfica. Escenografía. Narrativa y teatro paraniños (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2004).
Timothy Mitchell, Violence and Piety in Spanish Folklore (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 173.
José Escofet, “Comentarios leves. El ‘Tenorio’ inoportuno,” La Vanguardia, October 26, 1918.
Miguel Ángel Lama Hernández, “Transmisión y recepción del teatro del siglo XIX,” in Historia del teatro espanol, ed. Javier Huerta Calvo (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 2003), 2096.
“On the importance and sincereity of Don Juan’s transformation, see George P. Mansour, Parallelism in Don Juan Tenorio, Hispania 61.2 (1978): 245–53.”
On the relation between Don Juan and Spanish cultural identity, see James B. Mandrell, Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Tradition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 227.
Myla Goldberg, Wickett’s Remedy (New York: Anchor, 2005), 161–62.
Catherine Belling, “Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918,” Literature and Medicine 28, no. 1 (2009): 56.
Gonzalo Sobejano, “Don Juan en la literatura española del siglo XX: Ensayo y novela,” in Letras de la España contemporánea: Homenaje a José Luis Varela, ed. Nicasio Salvador Miguel (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1995), 334–45.
Gregorio Marañón, “Notas para la biología de Don Juan,” Obras Completas, vol. 4 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), 75.
Gary D. Keller, The Significance and Impact of Gregorio Marañón (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Review, 2007), 26.
Sarah Wright, “Gregorio Mara ñó n and ‘The Cult of Sex’: Effeminacy and Intersexuality in ‘The Psychopathology of Don Juan’ (1924),” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 6 (2004): 724.
Keller, The Significance and Impact of Gregorio Mara ñón, 47. It was not just literature, generally, but theater, specifically, that spoke to the issue of national identity. Since at least 1744, when Zamora’s No hay deuda que no se pague ni plazo que no se cumpla y convidado de piedra (There are no unmet deadlines and no unpaid debts, or the Stone Guest) was first staged, Don Juan, in one version or another, has graced Spanish stages every subsequent year. In 1844, the torch was passed to Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, the play that continues to be performed annually on or around All Souls’ Day even today. Sarah Wright has noted how Mara ñó n’s preoccupation with Don Juan reflects Don Juan’s penchant for disrupting the eugenic paradigm in which Mara ñó n operated. For a fuller treatment of the role of gender in this paradigm, see Nerea Aresti, Médicos, donjuanes y mujeres modernas: Los ideales de feminidad y masculinidad en el primer tercio del siglo XX (Bilbao: Universidad del Páıs Vasco, 2001).
Mandrell, “Nostalgia and the Popularity of Don Juan Tenorio: Reading Zorrilla Through Clarín,” Hispanic Review 59 (1991): 40.
José Alberich, La popularidad de Don Juan Tenorio y otros estudios de literatura española moderna (Zaragoza: Colección Aubí, 1982), 16.
Emilio Casares Rodicio, “El teatro musical en España (1800–1939),” in Historia del teatro español, directed by Javier Huerta Calvo, vol. 2, Del siglo XVIII a la época actual, ed. Fernando Doménech Rico and Emilio Peral Vega (Madrid: Gredos, 2003), 2052.
James Burnett, Manuel de Falla and the Spanish Musical Renaissance (London: Gollancz, 1979), 40–41.
José Deleito Piñuela, Origen y apogeo del género chico (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1949), 4. For James, the problem with the zarzuela stemmed from its “parochialism and localism,” a problem composers associated with the musical revival of the late nineteenth century in Spain worked to overcome. James, Manuel de Falla, 40.
For a study of the complex relation between (supposedly) high and low narrative literature in late-nineteenth-century Spain, see Stephanie Anne Sieburth, Inventing High and Low: Literature, Mass Culture, and Uneven Modernity in Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
Wadda C. Ríos-Font, “Literary History and Canon Formation,” in The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David Thatcher Gies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15.
Serge Salaün, “Espectáculos (tradición, modernidad, industrialización, comercialización),” in Los felices años veinte: España, crisis y modernidad, ed. Carlos Serrano and Serge Salaün (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006), 191.
On the importance of the letter in Don Juan Tenorio, see Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Carnival in Don Juan Tenorio,” Hispanic Review 51, no. 3 (1983).
Serge Salaün, “El Género Chico o los mecanismos de un pacto cultural,” in El teatro menor en España a partir del siglo XVI (Madrid: CSIC, 1983), 253. The Restoration period stretches from the fall of Spain’s First Republic in 1874 to the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 and refers to the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne. The 1876 Constitution established Spain as a bicameral constitutional monarchy and the Restoration was largely successful in breaking the cycle of internecine violence endemic to nineteenth-century Spain by instituting a program (turnismo or turno pacífico) whereby liberals and conservatives alternated in power.
Serge Salaün, “La zarzuela finisecular o el consenso nacional,” in Ramos Carrión y la zarzuela: Actas de las jornadas sobre Ramos Carrión y la zarzuela celebradas en Zamora en noviembre de1988 (Zamora: Instituto de Estudios Zamoranos Florián de Ocampo, 1988), 14.
On narrative templates in the context of collective memory, see James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 60–62.
The other image that deals with the Naples Soldier in the first epidemic wave (there were only two) also treats the song in a similar way. It portrays two men engaged in a “duel to the death” with each one launching verbal threats at the other:–Murderer! — May you be struck by lightning! — Let them sing you the Naples Soldier! As in figure 4.3, the song in this image, which appeared in La Tribuna on May 25, implicitly endows it with the power to harm, as though by virtue of the fact that it shared the epidemic’s name it were equally contagious. The role of the song in these images resembles that of f lies in Anglo-American health posters of the 1910s and 1920s. See Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, “Visual Imagery and Epidemics in the Twentieth Century,” in Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture, ed. David Serlin (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 176.
Ironically, two years after the flu epidemic, the affluent man of figure 4.3 would find himself in the position of the lower-class singers vis- à -vis an aesthetic elite. In 1921, José Ortega y Gasset published his essay on modernist music, “Musicalia,” in which he contrasts the inferior aesthetic judgment of the “good bourgeois” to that of a more informed elite. On Ortega y Gasset’s essay, see Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). In using aesthetic means to depict sociopolitical matters, Tovar mimics a then-common artistic strategy. The hapless musicians and perturbed bourgeois are caught in a social dynamic of taste and distinction that enveloped all of Spanish society.
Gabaldón, Luis “La semana cómica,” Blanco y Negro, June 9, 1918.
George Latimer Apperson, The Social History of Smoking (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 200.
The fact that the Soldier reads already distinguishes him from a large portion of the Spanish population. According to Antonio Viñao Frago, in 1920, 43.3 percent of the population ten years old or older was illiterate. Antonio Viñao Frago, “The History of Literacy in Spain: Evolution, Traits, and Questions,” History of Education Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1990): 584. That he prefers a pipe suggests he has the means to weather the economic pressures that caused cigarettes to surpass cigars and pipes as the most economical and even fashionable form of smoking tobacco. Egon Caesar Corti, A History of Smoking (London: G. G. Harrap, 1931), 251. However, in the only other images of a Naples Soldier smoking (there are two), he prefers a cigarette.
On this type of metaphorical slippage, see Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001). The pipe as a marker of the threat that the bourgeoisie perceived in social climbers appears in a related editorial cartoon by Francisco López Rubio (figure 5.8), which I discuss in the next chapter.
Germán Gullón, “Sociocultural Context and the Spanish Avant-garde: Theory and Practice,” in The Spanish Avant-garde, ed. Derek Harris (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 158.
See Steven G. Kellman, “Dropping Names: The Poetics of Titles,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 17 (1975): 155, and Peter Rabinowitz, “Reading Beginnings and Endings,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frame, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), 301.
Harry Levin, “The Title as Literary Genre,” Modern Language Review 72, no. 4 (1977): xxxv.
Marianna Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 7.
Eugenia Tognotti, “Scientific Triumphalism and Learning from Facts: Bacteriology and the ‘Spanish Flu’ Challenge of 1918,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 1 (2003): 106.
One image of the Naples Soldier in Heraldo de Madrid does represent him in a military uniform from the Napoleonic period, consistent with the period setting of Lacanción del olvido (1799) (October 2, 1918). The one exception is his hat, an early-twentieth-century piece. On Spanish military uniforms, see José M. Bueno, El ejército de Alfonso XIII: La infantería de línea (Madrid: Ediciones Barreira, 1983). Image 67 on page 20 most closely resembles the twentieth-century hat worn by the Naples Soldier in flu discourse. See also the website “Uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars 1800–1815.” http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/napoleonic_uniforms.html.
Jo Labanyi, “Horror, Spectacle and Nation-Formation: Historical Painting in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain,” in Visualizing Spanish Modernity, ed. Susan Larson and Eva Woods (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 64.
Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 141.
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© 2013 Ryan A. Davis
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Davis, R.A. (2013). Figuring (out) the Epidemic: Don Juan and Spanish Influenza. In: The Spanish Flu. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339218_5
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