España en la música alemana de las primeras generaciones románticas (1800-1830)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of Spain in German music, especially in the opera of the first Romantic generations. For centuries, the interest in Spain of certain European nations such as France, Germany and Italy had manifested itself in various fields such as literature, something that has been very well studied in philology and comparative literature. This interest, beyond mere anthropological curiosity, became, at certain times, a real passion for the Spanish, which flooded the theatre, the novel, but also opera, as the well-known example of Bizet's Carmen shows. But in all this phenomenon, there was not only a superficial interest in Spanish themes, settings or types transmitted by literature, but also a profound influence on European art forms, as has already been demonstrated, for example, by relating the libretto of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte to Calderón's El Purgatorio de San Patricio. After having seen the enormous interest in Spanish themes in German opera at the beginning of the century and also in instrumental music, it was possible to see how this interest went hand in hand with a new way of life and art which was Romanticism; since this is a cultural phenomenon of great magnitude and not just a one-off, superficial fashion, a methodology specific to history - and not only to music - has been used to understand it: the historical method of generations, developed by the so-called Escuela de Madrid in the 1930s. The method provided us with the chronology of our work, which corresponds to the periods of maximum artistic expression of the first Romantics, those born around 1770 -first generation- and around 1785 -second generation-: thus, the chronological framework covered by this study is from 1800 to1830...