acastro50

MOSTLY ZARZUELAS

Zarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, incorporating operatic and popular songs, as well as dance. It is a genre that flourished in 1650 to 1760 and later since about 1815. It withered from political and cultural pressure as well as competition with TV and movie theaters. Besides Spain, they have always been quite popular in Latin America, but have historically been forgotten by the American Public. Although they are considered a poor cousin by opera connoisseurs, the best zarzuelas rival in quality with the best operettas.

The playlists of zarzuelas in this channel are collections of available videos in Youtube, which in time I will sort and organize. Ocassionally I can compile a complete zarzuela, which I do note. Many of the videos are recordings of amateur performances, some excellent and some not so good, but always interesting,

The plot and the libretto of each zarzuela are available at http://lazarzuela.webcindario.com/Cantab/cantab.htm .
A great web Zarzuela database is maintained by Chris Weber at http://www.zarzuela.net/ref/inzar_ad.htm . It includes plots and comments on most popular works as well as hyperlinks to works and authors.

For those hard core aficionados, I recommend the RTVE site http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/la-zarzuela/ . They have about 80 one-hour downloadable shows (mp3, no videos), all of professional quality.

There are many other playlists here, with music that I like. Feel free to explore.

PLAYLISTS AND AUTOPLAY. Youtube refuses to make playlists user-friendly. There is no possibility to present them in alphabetical order. Also, the autoplay feature is buried deep. If you do want autoplay, there are 2 places. One is the main playlist index. You can go there by searching inYoutube for ACASTRO50, PLAYLIST . Again, they will be in random order, which makes difficult to find anything. A second method is to search in Youtube for ACASTRO50, 10, PLAYLIST . I indexed all the zarzuelas with this number, which makes easier to scan through the 60 or so zarzuelas available here.

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