Gato por liebre / El vizconde
Music: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri
Librettos: Antonio Hurtado, Francisco Camprodón

(streamed from Fundación Juan March,
Madrid, October 1 2025)

reviewed by Christopher Webber

While the toys were flying out of the pram down the road at Teatro de la Zarzuela’s Pepita Jiménez (‘When will they ever learn?’) we babies watching the live stream of two rare Barbieri zarzuelas from the Juan March Foundation were cooing in contentment. No embarrassment for us from musical or textual vandalism – the director-dramaturge Alfonso Romero actually added a few more lines of spoken dialogue himself – and no sense of anything other than wholehearted love for the work coming from the stage. In short, we were presented with that total belief in the material which makes theatre come alive.

You can read more about the background of these short, one-acters from Barbieri and Co.’s 1855/56 Teatro del Circo season in the superb programme downloadable here from Juan March, which features illuminating essays from eminent zarzuela experts Isabelle Porto San Martín and Enrique Mejías García. In essence, while Gato por liebre (crudely, ‘Mutton Dressed as Lamb’) was written as a tonadilla-style curtain piece to send audiences smiling into the street, El vizconde is a sophisticated opéra comique in historical mode, set in the swashbuckling era of Philip V. Both works exploit cross-dressing to enhance their theatrical effect, a happy chance which the Juan March company picked up and ran with.

More pedantically, there are three distinct patterns of cross-dressing at play here. At one level, we have the ‘pantomime dame’ tradition of middle-aged men playing aging women, to hilarious and mischievous effect (the Baroness and Countess ‘Muttons’ masquerading as ‘Lambs’). At another, we have the sexy ‘principal boy’, the titular Viscount who crosses feminine sensitivity with male heroism in a classic Cherubino-style trouser role, the pretty boy fighting duels. And at a third, cunningly interpolated by Romero, we have the shady chulo (Serafín) with codpiece lewdly enlarged, who exploits women to his own ends – a sort of avatar for Celia Gámez’s naughty-boy Pichi, with some of his/her brutal, homoerotic overspill. Rather than one priapic monolith, ready for carving by contemporary feminism, theatrical cross-dressing is as old – and as varied in effect – as time itself.

I’d whisper that some of it here becomes plain confusing. The devil tempted Romero to merge Barbieri’s works, so different in style and effect, into one continuous whole, by presenting El vizconde as two chunks of soap opera, being watched by the Baroness and Countess while they enjoy their bitching, bickering, and a discreet spliff. The inevitable interludes were covered by mock 1960s TV ads in knowingly banal style which rather broke the spell. The show looks good, with costume designer Rosa García Andújar devising cunningly colourful layers to suggest the singer’s morphing roles. In El vizconde – opera without the soap, incidentally – this produced the disconcerting effect of men playing women playing men, dragging in yet deeper cross-dressing ambiguities, like a mirror-imaged La viejecita. This boggled my mind at least a bit too much, distracting from the life-and-death seriousness of Camprodón’s elegant comedy.

But if the merger did little good, it did little harm either. As a consummate theatre artist Barbieri composed these two works in different styles. His palette for Gato por liebre is all primary colours, compared with the more muted shades and delicate ‘Spanish’ brushstrokes which bring El vizconde to life. The canvases may be Italianate, with echoes from Rossini to early Verdi, but such numbers as the Viscount’s gorgeously-varied aria ‘ Por una Eva gitana’ and the following, complex love-duet and trio ‘Tu corazón no tiene amor’ inhabit Barbieri’s own, distinctive world. Although splitting one zarzuela into three parts to envelope the double-decker sandwich of the other caused problems, the music was easily strong enough to overcome them.

Watching the neatly-directed video on Juan March’s postage-stamp of a stage gave great pleasure. Irene Palazón’s acting as The Viscount (and the mutton’s maid Cecilia) was tremendous, and her singing of Barbieri’s demanding soprano lines more than passed muster. César San Martín shone brightly in roles created for the great bass-baritone Francisco Salas, the desperate, astonishingly tall ‘thirties-something’ Baroness lighter of voice than the blustering, purblind father-figure in El vizconde. As her/his/their sidekick/female gossip/weedy son Juan Antonio Sanabria provided physical and vocal contrasts; and though Blanca Valido’s mezzo-soprano was comparatively underemployed as the objects of desire, aristocratic female and dodgy male delinquent respectively, she too hit her marks.

The March is too small for a full pit-band, but I liked Miquel Ortega’s deft arrangement for string sextet and piano a lot, and his firm grasp of comedy opera tempi and overall pacing even more. Romero directed the production with intelligent discretion, and an impeccable stagecraft which overcame the hurdles put in place by his own dramaturgical foible. From start to finish – as so often with Barbieri revivals – I was left wondering why on earth such memorable zarzuelas have been allowed to sleep for centuries. Compared with them, Rip Van Winkle endured little more than a light doze; and both Gato por liebre and El vizconde deserve to be more widely awake – as this happy production fortunately will be, in Spain and Colombia.

© Christopher Webber 2025

Cast: Cecilia and The Viscount - Irene Palazón; Serafín and Doña Elena - Blanca Valido; The Countess and Don Rodrigo - Juan Antonio Sanabria; The Baroness and Don Alfonso - César San Martín. Pablo Quintanilla and Elena Rey (violins), Adrián Vázquez (viola), Blanca Gorgojo (cello), Antonio Romero (double bass), Miquel Ortega (c. and piano). Alfonso Romero (dir. and dramaturgy), Carolina González Sanz (des.), Rosa García Andújar (cost.), Félix Garma Llaneza (light.). Musical arrangement by Miquel Ortega. Production by Fundación Juan March, Teatro de la Zarzuela, Teatro Mayor de Bogotá and Teatro Metropolitano de Medellin.

en español
Francisco Barbieri
homepage - zarzuela.net

2/X/2025