Viva, viva la Tirana: Clarifying an Elusive Spanish Dance Song A U R ÈLI A P E S S AR R O D O N A The late eighteenth century witnessed an increased permeability between elite and popular culture as upper-class entertainments took inspiration from vernacular cultural manifestations. We find excellent examples in Spanish music and dance, with the rise of many popular genres such as fandangos and seguidillas that crossed social boundaries and became widely popular in theaters and even salons as one- off songs. In fact, some of these genres, which were highly stylized, constitute 469 the basis of classical Spanish dance—much later termed the “Bolero School”—that also became the typical and topical musical image of Spain abroad, as we can see in the famous fandangos inserted in scenic works by Gluck and Mozart, or the seguidillas in Giovanni Paisiello’s and Vicente Martı́n y Soler’s operas, to mention only a few eighteenth-century theatrical examples. The eighteenth-century fandango has already received notable attention from scholars,1 and now seguidillas are gaining increased This article came to fruition as part of the project “Musicologı́a e interpretación musical en España: diálogos para una integración disciplinar” (Universidad Alfonso X el Sabio – Banco Santander), with additional funding from the Alfonso X el Sabio Foundation. I would like to thank Germán Labrador and David Irving for their invaluable tips on the manuscript, José Antonio Morales for pro- viding me the manuscript of his unpublished article on the topic, Maria José Ruiz Mayordomo for illuminating me on the dancing contexts, the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid’s staff for helping provide all the material despite the difficult situation generated by COVID-19, and Stephanie Graham for her accurate revision and correction of English. 1 See, for instance, Judith Etzion, “The Spanish Fandango: From Eighteenth-Century ‘Lasciviousness’ to Nineteenth-Century Exoticism,” Anuario Musical 48 (1993): 229–50; The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 39, Issue 4, pp. 469–539, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.  2022 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permis- sions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ JM.2022.39.4.469 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y recognition as well.2 Notwithstanding these efforts, an important over- sight remains: the tirana, a dance song that became popular during the last third of the century onward, even inspiring foreign composers such as Luigi Boccherini, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Saverio Mercadante. There has yet to be a substantial study of the musical characteristics of the tirana.3 On the contrary, it has been thought that the tirana was, in reality, a general name for Andalusian songs, without clear typologies or concrete identifying musical characteristics. For example, the flamenco specialist Arcadio Larrea affirmed: “When I think of that multitude of songs called tiranas, so very musically diverse, there is no end to the difficulty I find in understanding the tirana as an independent and - Peter Manuel, “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual Tonicity in Spanish and Latin American Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002): 311–36; Pompeyo Juan Pérez Dı́az, “Los fandangos de Boccherini y de Dionisio Aguado: ¿Dos propuestas a partir de una fuente de inspiración común?,” in Luigi Boccherini: Estudios sobre fuentes, recepción e historiografı́a, ed. Marco Mangani, Elisabeth Le Guin, and Jaime Tortella (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 2006), 135–42; Norberto Torres, “La evolución de los toques fla- mencos: Desde el fandango dieciochesco ‘por medio,’ hasta los toques mineros del siglo XX,” Revista de Investigación sobre Flamenco “ La madrugá” 2 (2010): 1–87; K. Meira Goldberg 470 and Antoni Pizà, eds., The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance: Spaniards, Indians, Africans and Gypsies (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2016); and Ana Lombardı́a, “From Lavapiés to Stockholm: Eighteenth-Century Violin Fandangos and the Shaping of Musical ‘Spanishness,’” Eighteenth-Century Music 17 (2020): 177–99. 2 See, for instance, Adela Presas, “Aproximación a la forma literario-musical de las seguidillas en la tonadilla escénica,” in Teatro y música en España: Los géneros breves en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII, ed. Joaquı́n Álvarez Barrientos and Begoña Lolo (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid–CSIC, 2008), 149–64; Elisabeth Le Guin, The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 108–28; Aurèlia Pessarrodona, “Il ritorno di Figaro in patria: Some Comments on the Reception of Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in Madrid,” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 56 (2021): 95–142, at 129–36; and Elvira Carrión, “La danza en España en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII: El bolero” (PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2017). For a more general overview, see Una mirada al patrimonio cultural inmaterial. La seguidilla: Expresión de una cul- tura (Ciudad Real: CIOFF, 2020). 3 The only articles specifically on the tirana are José Subirá, “La tirana poético- musical,” Segismundo 3 (1967): 161–78; José Antonio Morales, “La Tirana del trı́pili en el repertorio tonadillesco,” Música de Andalucı́a en la Red (2017, unpublished); and Sara Navarro, “Tiranas y polacas en la tonadilla escénica: Poesı́a, música y baile en los escenarios teatrales de la corte madrileña,” Revista de Humanidades 41 (2020): 37–60. There are no systematic analyses of the musical characteristics of the tirana besides some entries in specialized dictionaries, such as Antonio Fargas y Soler, Diccionario de la música (Barcelona: Imprenta de Joaquı́n Verdaguer, 1852), 207; Carlos José Melcior, Diccionario enciclopédico de la música (Lérida: Imp. Barcelonsa de Alejandro Garcı́a, 1859), 416; Felipe Pedrell, Dic- cionario técnico de la música, 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Isidro Torres Oriol, 1894), 457; Luisa Lacál, Diccionario de la música: Técnico, histórico, bio-bibliográfico, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Est. tip. de San Francisco de Sales, 1900), 538; Jaime Pahissa, dir., Diccionario de la música ilustrado (Barcelona: Central Catalana de Publicaciones, ca. 1929), 1146; Joaquı́n Pena and Higinio Anglès, Diccionario de la música Labor (Barcelona: Labor, 1954), 2:2121; and, more recently, Mariano Pérez Gutiérrez, “Tirana,” in Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana, dir. Emilio Casares (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, 1999–2002), 10:304–5. On this topic, see Navarro, “Tiranas y polacas,” 45–46. pessarrodona unique form.”4 Following this line, Celsa Alonso, in her study on nineteenth-century Spanish art song, contended that the tirana “simply would make reference to a song that sets a quatrain to music.”5 In his investigations of the jaleo dances,6 Miguel Ángel Berlanga similarly con- siders the tirana to be the general name of songs made for dancing jaleos.7 These assertions are not based on systematic analyses of eighteenth- century tiranas, and they ignore the rich contemporary sources available, above all those from the old public theaters of Madrid, now held in the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid (hereafter E-Mm). The objec- tive of this article is to examine and analyze the eighteenth-century tirana in order to determine its main characteristics, which would allow us to define it and study its likely impact abroad. Although this article deals primarily with tiranas in the context of Madrid’s theaters, the influential and representative testimonies discussed here may also shed light on the main characteristics of the dance song more broadly. Given the sizable number of pieces held in the E-Mm, this research has focused on reper- toire of the 1770s and 1780s, a period of development and consolidation of the tirana in the Madrilenian context.8 For this reason, the majority of the works discussed here were composed by Pablo Esteve (ca. 1730–94) 471 or Blas de Laserna (1751–1816), official composers of the two theatrical companies of Madrid in 1778 and 1779 respectively,9 or by other related 4 See Arcadio Larrea, El flamenco en su raı́z (1974; repr. Seville: Signatura Ediciones, 2004), 120; quoted in Celsa Alonso, La canción lı́rica española en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 1998), 65. 5 See Alonso, La canción lı́rica española, 65. 6 Jaleo is a generic name for Andalusian dances typically performed solo and accompanied by hand-clapping; jaleo dances, according to Berlanga, are the direct ante- cedents of flamenco dances. See Miguel Ángel Berlanga, “Los bailes de jaleo, precedentes directos de los bailes flamencos,” Anuario Musical 71 (2016): 179–95, at 180–81. 7 See Berlanga, “Los bailes de jaleo,” 191. 8 The period with the greatest presence of tiranas in tonadillas was the 1780s. See Navarro, “Tiranas y polacas,” 42. 9 See José Subirá, La tonadilla escénica (Madrid: Tipografı́a de Archivos, 1928–30), 1:171–72. Accurate and up-to-date monographs on these relevant and prolific composers are lacking. On Pablo Esteve, see, for instance, Juan Pablo Fernández, El mecenazgo musical de las Casas de Osuna y Benavente (1733–1844): Un estudio sobre el papel de la música en la alta nobleza española (PhD diss., Universidad de Granada, 2005), 1:207–13, 450–68. On Blas de Laserna, see the classic essay by Julio Goméz, “Don Blas de Laserna: Un capı́tulo de la historia del teatro lı́rico español visto en la vida del último tonadillero” [1925–26], in Escritos de Julio Gómez: Recopilación y comentarios, ed. Antonio Iglesias (Madrid: Alpuerto, 1986), 71–165; or, more recently, Andrés Gámez, “Blas de Laserna (1751–1816), una biografı́a marcada por el teatro,” Quodlibet: Revista de Especialización Musical 70 (2019): 140–65. t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y musicians, such as Antonio Rosales (1740–1801)10 and Jacinto Valledor (1744–1809).11 Historical and Contextual Background: The Tirana as a sonsonete popular In the popular culture of late eighteenth-century Spain, the word tirana was polysemic. Its primary meaning was “female tyrant,” used both as a noun and an adjective, but it referred also to both an actress and a dance song. The actress Marı́a del Rosario Fernández (1755–1803) was known as La Tirana because she was the wife of the actor Francisco Castellanos (El Tirano), who specialized in playing tyrants. Rosario Fernández was one of the most celebrated performers on Spanish stages during this period; however, although her name has been cause for confusion, she had no relationship with the tirana as a dance song: she specialized in tragic roles and sang only occasionally.12 At the same time, the dance song known as the tirana became very popular. The name was derived from expressions common to the refrains, such as “ay, tirana,” or from the typical reproaches addressed 472 to a hypothetical unrequited female lover whose indifferent behavior resembles a “female tyrant”;13 eventually tirana became a catchword for the genre. The most extensive contemporary description is by Juan Antonio de Iza Zamácola, writing under the alias “Don Preciso” in the prologue to the first volume of his Colección de las mejores coplas de segui- dillas, tiranas y polos que se han compuesto para cantar a la guitarra (Collec- tion of the best stanzas of seguidillas, tiranas, and polos composed to sing with the guitar, 1799). The intention of this work was to differentiate real and authentic Spanish songs from the “invasion” of foreign culture, above all Italian opera. Among the Spanish repertoire Iza Zamácola includes the tirana, which he explains as follows: 10 Rosales collaborated often with the theaters of Madrid. See Begoña Lolo and Germán Labrador, La música en los teatros de Madrid, I: Antonio Rosales y la tonadilla escénica (Madrid: Alpuerto, 2005). 11 Valledor was músico (a kind of composer’s assistant) to the theatrical companies of Madrid upon his return from Barcelona in 1785. See Pessarrodona, Jacinto Valledor y la tonadilla, chaps. 6 and 7. 12 See Subirá, La tonadilla escénica, 2:268; and Subirá, “La tirana poético-musical,” 176–77. 13 Exceptionally a tirano (male tyrant) is mentioned, normally in tiranas with a dia- logue between a man and a woman, as, for instance, in La peregrina y el payo by Rosales (1783), Aviso a los forasteros y mal uso del idioma by Esteve (1784), and in the different versions of the last tirana from Los majos de rumbo by Valledor (1790–93). On this tonadilla see Aurèlia Pessarrodona, Jacinto Valledor (1744–1809): Tonadillas, vol. 2, Obras a partir de 1785 (Madrid: CSIC, forthcoming).