By: Verónica Fernández Díaz

One of the creative edges of the Camagüey-born musician José Marín Varona (1859-1912) was the creation of zarzuela, work that he began in Havana as director of orchestras for the theater.

Together with maestro Modesto Julián, director of the Albisu Theater, Marín Varona directed great companies of Spanish zarzuelas and Italian opera that had an impact in Latin America. In this way he became renowned as a conductor and contributed to the development of the vernacular theatre.

Gustavo Robreño, for example, included him among the exponents of the initial stage of Cuban lyrical theater and characterized him as “[…] exalting Cuban song within the dramatic lyrical genre.” Gonzalo Roig also highlighted this facet of the man from Camagüey and in this regard pointed out that “[…] he was always at the service of the artistic nationality, perhaps with passionate vehemence”.

Marín Varona was a representative of a buffo in which the treatment of language is very Cuban; genres of popular music written especially for representation in the style of zarzuela are incorporated and where the characters are extracted from everyday life: blacks, caleseros, poor Spaniards, humble young people, criollos without money and raised in search of reward, as well as young people who think about the independence of Cuba.

In the opinion of Rine Leal: “The bufos are essentially a musical theater, in which on many occasions the text is nothing more than a pretext to use popular music with great scenic effect in original scores for the theater.” So that the jokes are defined with their own expression that denied the foreign in terms of themes, language, music, characters and social environment, although they raised “el negrito” and “la mulata” as false exponents of nationality.

Although he wrote several, Marín Varona’s best-known zarzuela was El Brujo, work written in one act, five scenes and prose with a libretto by J. R. Barreiro. Although most of his characters are of African descent, neither the language in which they express themselves nor the music they play show elements that characterize them. On the contrary, the language is refined and well versed and the genres used are either romantic songs in the style of the European salon or Creole musical forms such as the guajira where the African component is not so marked.

The most important musical part of the zarzuela is the duet song “Half of life is love”, written for the leading characters Juan Francisco and Felesfora performed in the second scene of the zarzuela that takes place in the battlefield, where Felesfora goes to meet her beloved Juan Francisco, a black sorcerer of Conga descent.

The scene ends when, supposedly, Juan Francisco is shot, but in reality it is José, the black professor in love with Felesfora who pretends to be him. In the third scene, developed in a sugar mill, another of the musical parts that are preserved today appears: the guajira “La puerta de mi bohío” as the culmination of a previous dialogue between the guard who comes by Juan Francisco and the choir, that it is used as a kind of narrator.

The final duet of the zarzuela, with a happy ending, is another important moment. The librettist himself, anticipating a possible success, wrote several verses to be repeated with the music if the public requested it. But El Brujo only triumphed because of his music, since critics of the time described it as “[…] a miscellany, incomprehensible at times, a mess, a succession of scenes without head or tail, dotted with phrases fat as fists.” However, the prominent musician Odilio Urfé considered it, due to its music, as “[…] a top exponent of the initial stage of the so-called vernacular along with the work of Raimundo Valenzuela La mulata María 1896 and La gran rumba 1894 by Jorge Anckerman” .

Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García