In addition, the researcher of the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Communication recalls that the Academy of Valencia, at least since 1691, was producing dramatised parties with music similar to the lyrical theatre. In this sense, Andrea Bombi considers that the location of a libretto documenting the representation in Valencia of the work La entrada de Baco en Tebas, on February 6, 1705, in no way identifies the first representation of lyric theatre in Valencia, as it was spread by mid-April following a research by Nieves Pascual, professor at the Valencia Conservatory of Music.

The expert from the University of Valencia supports his thesis in the fact that also philologist Pasqual Mas i Usó reconstructs in his doctoral thesis (1993) the genealogy of these “Zarzuela-style” parties from at least 1685. In addition, Bombi recalls, scholar Arturo Zabala includes these episodes among the manifestations of musical theatre prior to the Italian opera productions of Francesco Corradini, both in the Royal Palace and in the Teatro de la Olivera in Valencia, between 1728 and 1731.

According to the professor of the University of Valencia, the La entrada de Baco en Tebas location “is an important and useful achievement to complete a historical painting already reconstructed in its master lines”, and provides “one more document of the diffusion of the Hispanic lyrical theatre, well settled in the Peninsula since the mid-seventeenth century”. However, “relating, as Pascual does, this production with the reception in Valencia of the Italian musical theatre only creates confusion”, being two very different phenomena. In this sense, the specialist concludes, “interpreting the sources in coherent tables is more important than establishing this or that chronological milestone”.

Andrea Bombi believes that a finding of this relevance should have been disseminated in the scientific field previously to the media, contrasting it more slowly with the research produced by the personnel specialised in musicology and philology of the last 20 years, in order to be able to complete the Valencian theatre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Photo captions:

Cover of the Valencian manuscript of the work La fiera, el rayo y la piedra by Calderón. Source: Biblioteca Nacional de España.