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Juan Pablo Fernández-Cortés, ¿Qué quita a lo noble un airecito de maja? National and gender identities in the zarzuela Clementina (1786) by Luigi Boccherini and Ramón de la Cruz, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 223–236, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas046
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Abstract
The lack of attention to, and historiographic manipulation of, the 18th-century zarzuela until very recently has resulted in the absence of this genre from studies of national and gender identities. This article explores the expressions of Spanish national identity and new models of femininity and masculinity as shaped in the zarzuela Clementina (1786), with music by Luigi Boccherini and libretto by Ramón de la Cruz; commissioned by María Faustina Téllez-Girón (1724–97), widow Countess-Duchess of Benavente, it premiered at her palace in Madrid on 3 January 1787. Clementina is a paradigmatic example of the hybridization found in Spanish music theatre at the end of the 18th century, where apparently antithetical musical styles and dramatic typologies in the Spanish tradition coexist with then-current European aesthetics.
The characters in Clementina, underlined by their musical treatment, reveal the presence of roles of both the ancien régime and of a more progressive society. A woman constrained to the domestic space, represented by Clementina and her governess Doña Damiana, is confronted by the character of Narcisa—Clementina’s younger sister, the worldly counterpoint of a young aristocrat who enjoys certain freedom of movement and behaviour, which includes emulation of foreign customs (petimetrería, chichisbeo) and those of an inferior social class (majismo). Particularly interesting is Boccherini’s use of the musical indication to perform con smorfia, a term associated with feminine characters who feign innocence, such as Narcisa and the maid Cristeta. The masculine characters in Clementina also include the opposition between the traditional Spanish roles (the figurón and the abate) and the new sentimental man, portrayed by Don Urbano, a refined Portuguese gentleman of extreme sentimentality and a paradigm of ‘Otherness’.
