Musicologists, particularly scholars of Iberian music, will already be familiar with Elisabeth Le Guin and her work on late eighteenth-century music through her previous book Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Her most recent work, The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain, continues within this period but shifts focus to dramatic music. Her book is valuable not only for its relatively unfamiliar content, which makes it an indispensable volume for scholars of both Spanish music and drama in general, but also for Le Guin's approach to her subject, examining and drawing conclusions from correspondence, censor reviews, contemporaneous newspaper articles, various types of libretto and the extant music.
The book is divided into an introduction and seven sections (five chapters and two shorter sections), followed by 133 pages of examples, endnotes, bibliography and index. The inclusion of both examples within the main text and longer scores in the Appendix is a significant benefit. These samples both help to prove her important points and give a taste of the richness and variety of the tonadilla genre. In a book about a better-known genre, such extensive examples might be considered excessive; however, this genre is so poorly known to today's audiences that the inclusion of numerous and lengthy examples can be justified.
Le Guin begins the book by introducing the tonadilla, a short, comic dramatic piece meant to be inserted into longer works and serving a similar purpose as the Italian intermezzo. The tonadilla was well known to audiences in the second half of the eighteenth century, but owing to a variety of circumstances discussed by Le Guin, the genre fell out of favour, and it is almost unknown today. Le Guin notes that many writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found the tonadilla to be too influenced by Italianate styles to be part of the nationalist musical identity they were constructing. Other writers, conversely, thought the tonadilla embodied the unique folk flavour of Spanish comedy, but dismissed the genre because it was not weighty enough to be taken seriously. In both cases, the tonadilla was excluded from monographs and other studies on Spain's musical heritage.
Chapter 1 seeks to give the reader a sense of the time and place in which tonadillas were heard. In a literary flight of fancy, Le Guin creates a work of historical fiction based on an actual tonadilla performance. It is presented in the form of a letter addressed to an audience member's sibling, and describes various historical and invented audience members’ reactions to the performance. The fact that this is a fictionalized narrative of her own creation and not a quotation from an archival source is only briefly mentioned at the end of the introduction. Readers who value this kind of historical re-creation are likely to find it informative and valuable in ‘setting the scene’ for the rest of the book. Those like me who find the invention of dialogue for historical characters within the confines of an academic monograph dubious at best may find chapter 1 tiresome and perhaps best skipped entirely. There is little factual information in the chapter that is not found elsewhere in the work.
In chapter 2 (‘Players’) Le Guin introduces the reader to the different kinds of theatre organizations involved in the performance of tonadillas and explains how each worked. This chapter, as well as the book as a whole, focuses more on the tonadilla performers than on the audiences. She briefly describes the duties of each member of a company and highlights some of the most important composers, actors and actresses working in eighteenth-century Madrid. Chapter 3 (‘Rhythms’) discusses many technical aspects of the tonadilla, including descriptions of coplas, seguidillas and boleros, three prevalent poetic forms used throughout the genre, and the galant musical style in which most eighteenth-century tonadillas were composed.
The following section, ‘Intermedio’, is not labelled as a separate chapter. Changing focus, it takes a different topic as its theme (not unlike a tonadilla): how the performers and Madrid audiences would have understood the colonialist references found in some tonadillas. Le Guin is careful to delineate the limits of her study, and thus the chapter treats the appearance of these themes within the confines of Madrid and does not attempt to draw conclusions about tonadilla performances in other centres of colonial Spain, for example Mexico City and Manila.
Chapter 4 (‘Bandits’) returns to the interior world of the tonadilla and one of its most important character types, the bandit. Le Guin traces the etymology of the word bandido and the development of the bandit character through early dramatic works by Lope de Vega, providing a fascinating history of the type and how it was portrayed in various musical styles. Chapter 5 (‘Late Tonadillas’) follows the genre through to the early nineteenth century. It was a difficult time for Madrid for a number of reasons, including, most obviously, the Napoleonic wars; Le Guin argues that the tonadilla reflected these difficulties in various ways, for example in subtly subversive texts and in pieces that were generally longer and closer to zarzuelas or operas.
In the concluding section, ‘Fin de Fiesta’ (The End of the Celebration), Le Guin discusses her two attempts at putting on performances of a particular tonadilla and the pros and cons of staging the works for a twenty-first-century audience. She believes it is nearly impossible to perform these works for today's public, citing a lack of understanding of eighteenth-century events and opinions crucial to the subtle jokes that fill the tonadillas. With these points of view unshared, perhaps impossible to share, the jokes fall flat or take on a kind of foreignness that she convincingly argues was anathema to the purpose of the genre. However, at the end of the section, she concedes that it might be possible for a knowledgeable audience to appreciate the piece if performed by a skilled group of highly trained professionals who have carefully rehearsed each point of humour. This is perhaps the point on which Le Guin and I disagree most. I believe it is possible for modern audiences to enjoy the types of tonadillas that Le Guin believes to be inaccessible without hours of rehearsing the jokes beforehand; however, I also think in order for this to work the piece must be ‘re-created’ to appeal to moderns, as well as tailored to the particular public viewing the piece.
A recent personal experience can serve as an example. In July I attended the North American premiere of Florian Gassmann's L'opera seria, a comic opera which, like many tonadillas, was based on the trials and tribulations of putting on an opera. The production, mounted by Wolf Trap Opera in Vienna, Virginia, was a smashing success even with an audience unlikely to have been experts in the finer points of galant style or eighteenth-century culture. What they did understand, though, is diva culture and stage mothers, both of which the director Matthew Ozawa put to excellent use. The first and second acts were set in modern times with cell phone gags and mics that malfunctioned. The ‘opera’ that takes place during the third act was in eighteenth-century dress. Works such as this, as well as the tonadillas featured in Le Guin's book, can still be performed if the piece is reconfigured to appeal to the attending public. What Le Guin hints at is the reason tonadillas are unlikely to make a comeback any time soon. The required revamping of a piece is very difficult and time-consuming, especially when one must start by making a modern performing edition.
Le Guin's The Tonadilla in Performance is an important book for many reasons. Perhaps most important, however, is that yet another reputable scholar has taken note of the huge influence of Italian styles, especially the galant, on eighteenth-century Spanish music without negative connotations or condescension. I hope other scholars adopt her approachably readable-yet-well-documented style as well as her desire to take on the less studied genres and shine light onto once controversial issues now ready to be revealed.
