El dramaturgo José de Cañizares (1676-1750) y la música teatral entre 1697-1723

Abstract

From the nineteenth century onwards, José de Cañizares (1676-1750) was regarded as a playwright from a period of darkness and decadence for Spanish theatre, and his relevance for music was not taken too much into account until the last few decades. The present doctoral thesis aims to question the prejudices about this librettist and restore him to his rightful place in the History of music in the Iberian Peninsula. A further objective is that of studying the aesthetic of Spanish theatre of the entre siglos period (1675-1725) from a musicological point of view through Cañizares’s texts. The 1697-1723 chronology has been chosen because it ranges from his beginnings as a court poet to the year of the premiere of La hazaña mayor de Alcides, the last of his three operas composed together with the Venetian musician Giacomo Facco and performed in the Coliseo del Buen Retiro.The structure is divided into three parts: the biography of the librettist, emphasising his relationship with the music; the context of the musical theatre in Madrid in relation to the Cañizares’s texts; and the analyses of his poems for singing purposes...