Spanish speakers: some 43 million people in the United States speak Spanish, with another 384 million in Central & South America. The main reason is because of the conquest of many areas of the Americas by the Spanish in centuries past.
Philip IV was crowned King of Spain in 1621, and he reigned for 19 years. This fascinating book looks at what was going on in Spain’s far-flung empire on the occasion of one particular event: the birth of his son Felipe Prospero.
It might be a spoiler, but I must state at the outset it was all for nothing. Felipe was born in 1657, and died in 1661. It was in 1661 that Philip had another son, Charles, who would succeed him as Charles II in 1665. Since Charles had no heir, the entire house of cards fell. He was the last monarch of the House of Habsburg, and his failure to have a son sparked the War of the Spanish Succession that devastated Europe from 1700 to 1714. Some 700,000 people were killed.
But all that is in the future for this book, which looks at the worldwide celebrations for the birth of Felipe, who everyone expected to be their next king.
Author of the book is Mary B. Quinn (University of New Mexico), who has also written The Moor and the Novel: Narrating Absence in Early Modern Spain and co-editor of Aural Culture and Poetics in the Early Modern Hispanic World: Sound, Rhythm, and Music.
The royal court in Madrid was naturally the focal point of the celebrations (the first 2 chapters), but Quinn also devotes individual chapters to the response in Naples, Florence, and finally Lima & Peru. Rather than a dry recitation of the spectacles, Quinn puts everything in perspective and uncovers the subtext of each performance. It turns out the so-called celebrations outside Madrid were actually protests against the heavy yoke of Spanish rule, which at that time included present-day New Mexico, Arizona, California and Florida.
“This book casts a wide net,” she writes, “analyzing operatic libretti, zarzuela texts, notated music, paintings, poems, and descriptive literary accounts. It reveals that an array of people took advantage of this celebratory moment to question the Empire’s policies in surprising ways.”
The zarzuela is a well-known fixture now, but it actually had its origin in the celebrations for Felipe. “The playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca invented a new musical-theatrical genre for the festivity: zarzuela.” His work studied here, which has been largely ignored by other scholars, is entitled El laurel de Apolo, and “retells Ovid’s myth of Apollo and Daphne.” Through a close analysis, Quinn has discovered that through a combination of sound, music and verse, the zarzuela “presents a direct rebuke of the Crown and its maladministration of the Empire.” She highlights the actual sound of the performance “as a locus of political struggle.” Quinn says the modern mind favours sight over sound, which accounts for our inability to assess the importance of sound in performance. “Calderon’s first zarzuela clearly places the power and significance of sound in a central place that eclipses the power of sight.”
Part of the zarzuela begins with a song that celebrates the birth of the prince. “No one has noted the political engagement and extended this as a means to frame and interpret the myth that follows.” The argument is too complex to summarise here; suffice it to say Quinn has broken new ground that, when properly assimilated by other scholars, will transform our understanding of the power of performative sound in general and this zarzuela in particular.
There was yet another Madrid palace performance that, according to contemporary records, eclipsed even the zarzuela. It was a musical theatrical spectacle by Antonio de Solis, Triunfos de Amor Fortuna. It was first staged in February 1658 and featured 132 performers from all over Spain, including 42 female musicians. Despite its importance, Quinn judges that, although it ran for 60 performances, “it lacks literary merit.” A painting that she relates it to, because it uses theatrical techniques as effectively as the Triunfos, certainly does have merit. It is by Velasquez, and was finished around the same time (Los hilanderas o la fabula de Aracne). “Both works center on competitions between deity and mortal,” and both Solis and Velasquez were richly rewarded by the King shortly afterwards. Both works also embody a full sensory experience for the attentive viewer. The painting includes a spinning wheel being used, which evokes both a mobile act and the sonic; the Truinfos also brought Solis’ audience delight by “engaging in a full sensory experience.” I found the dual interpretations quite creative, and while neither directly influenced the other, it shows how similar methods of engaging the viewer were active at the time.
A similar approach is used in her chapter on Naples, where an opera (Il Triuno della Pace, by Giuseppe Castaldo) is given a “sensorial reading” that reveals “fissures in the Neapolitan celebrations for the new prince, illuminating the friction between the empire’s center and periphery.” To understand this fully, the author gives us the political backdrop, including the fact Naples proclaimed a republic in 1647. It lasted only 9 months, when Spain gained control of the city. The Spanish viceroys of Naples “never cultivated opera. So why was opera used to celebrate a Spanish prince?” The answer to that pregnant question animates this chapter.
The “silent presence” of Parthenope in the opera “speaks volumes about Neapolitan ambivalence towards imperial authority.” In mythology, Parthenope, a siren, threw herself into the sea after failing to seduce Odysseus; “her body washed up on the shores where Naples was then founded. The image of Parthenope was a staple of the city’s festivals, and the short-lived Republic of Naples was named in her honour. The aural poetics of Parthenope, a myth so crucial to the identity of Naples, questions a simple acceptance of Spanish domination over this viceregal city.” Quinn thus finds understanding in silence, another crucial aspect of princely celebrations until now not revealed by scholarship.
Aural poetics are also at the heart of her study of celebrations in Florence, where the opera L’Ipermestra “is the best documented opera of the seventeenth century.” Quinn delves into the life of its composer Pier Francesco Cesi, and the history of Florence, to reveal that the opera is an analogy for Florence itself. The opera ridicules King Philip for not fostering an heir sooner. “The myth of Ipermestra was clearly applicable to the precarious position of Florence, caught between the Scylla of France and the Caribdis of Spain.” One can imagine the opinion of the citizens of this great Italian city as both France and Spain vied for control of it.
Lima, in Peru, was another viceregal city of the Spanish empire. A book published in 1659 takes 170 pages to describe all the celebrations it mounted for the birth of the prince. As for what the native people thought of all this, the book “does not describe the celebration of the Incas at all.” It was much the same in Manila; after 350 years of Spanish rule there, less than 1% of the population was from Spain. In an exploration of festivities there, the author once again depends “on the visual, the sonic, and the olfactory to create a vivid picture of the festival.”
An insightful book on many levels, this should be widely studied by anyone interested in European politics and theatrical performances of the 17th century, as well as those who recognize that capturing the sensorial aspects of the past are crucial for understanding it.
Sense and Spectacle in the Age of Philip IV: Performing Empire in Word, Music, and Image. It is by Amsterdam University Press, and lists for $138.
Image: painting by Velazquez of King Philip IV, in 1644.