‘Spain is different’, the Spanish tourist board famously declared in the 1960s as part of its strategy to attract mass tourism to the country. The campaign played a key role in opening up Spain's economy during the later years of Franco's regime – the so-called apertura – following two decades of autarchic rule that had left the country geopolitically isolated.Footnote ¹ As the slogan suggested, however, exoticism was a key part of Spain's nation-branding. Ideas of Spanish difference were now marketed for their tourist appeal, with images of gypsies and flamenco joined by sizzling beaches and ice-cold sangria.

Further west, Franco's contemporary Antonio Salazar was initially sceptical about promoting tourism to Portugal (‘we prefer one thousand times the foreigner to the tourist’, an official guidebook declared in 1940), but by the early 1960s the Portuguese dictator too began to encourage greater numbers of visitors.Footnote ² The newly built airport in Faro would complement the traditional villages of the interior, it was argued, while serving the sandy beaches and deluxe golf courses of the Algarve. Franco's campaign was undoubtedly much more ambitious in scale, benefitting from Spain's vast (and as yet unspoilt) coastline, as well as the Generalísimo's enthusiasm for building links with his first-world contemporaries from the 1950s onwards. In both cases, however, ideas of difference – and even peripherality – were deployed to project the Iberian peninsula into the global economy: difference, that is, of an essentially unthreatening and attractive kind.

In recent decades numerous historians have sought to challenge these long-standing ideas of Iberian alterity.Footnote ³ In particular, a wide range of scholars have critiqued the ‘black legend’ of Spanish decadence and barbarity hastened by the loss of its South American empire, seeking instead to place the country in the mainstream of Western (European) developments.Footnote ⁴ In Anglophone musicology, these efforts have been supported by various initiatives to promote the study of Iberian and Latin American musics, such as the Robert M. Stevenson prize founded in 2004 by the American Musicological Society to honour scholarship examining music ‘composed, performed, created, collected, belonging to, or descended from the musical cultures of Spain, Portugal, and all Latin American areas in which Spanish and Portuguese are spoken’ (at present around 650 million native speakers, or nearly 10 per cent of the planet's population).Footnote ⁵ The call for papers exploring ‘Latin American music’ at the 2018 AMS meeting in San Antonio might in this light be considered something of a watershed. Yet as several scholars have noted, this expansion of disciplinary subgroups has not necessarily reshaped hierarchies as might have been expected. Nor has it consistently rewritten familiar historiographical narratives, tending instead to harden divisions between fields of study.Footnote ⁶ At the time of writing, barely a handful of the AMS's other prizes have ever been won by works focusing on Iberian or Latin American musical cultures (one of which was Elisabeth Le Guin's landmark The Tonadilla in Performance: Lyric Comedy in Enlightenment Spain, glowingly reviewed in these pages by Matthew Head).Footnote ⁷ Nor have recent general histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music found much space for the Iberian peninsula, beyond its participation in narratives of early twentieth-century musical nationalisms through the work of Granados, Albéniz, Falla, Turina and the like.

From a specifically operatic perspective, this lacuna is even more striking. Most major English-language histories of opera are almost entirely silent on these regions, apart from the expected mentions of Bizet's Carmen and Falla's La Vida Breve – a reflection no doubt of the limited circulation of Spanish and Portuguese music theatre beyond their linguistic communities.Footnote ⁸ But here, too, there are signs of movement. The recent musicological turn towards transnationalism has directed welcome attention towards less explored topographies, while studies of non-operatic theatrical genres such as operetta have encouraged research on marginalised historical figures. In all these disciplinary developments, the Iberian world offers rich terrain: from zarzuela and revista (revue) theatre to the operatic venues of Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro (to name a few). Of course, conflating the musical cultures of Iberia and Latin America is problematic in many ways, not least given the reaction against Spanish repertoire in several South American countries during the early nineteenth century following independence.Footnote ⁹ But if South American countries have been neglected in operatic histories, Spain and Portugal have arguably fared little better, frequently defined by a similar logic of alterity that has excluded them on the basis of radical difference or creative infertility.

Change, then, is welcome. All three of the monographs under review here explore the shifting relationships between music theatre (broadly conceived), the Iberian peninsula and wider ideas of modernity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And in all three works, transnational perspectives are a recurrent theme – above all as shaped by the anxieties of peripherality on the part of Spanish and Portuguese nineteenth-century thinkers. Whatever else one might conclude from surveying these books, they can offer an invaluable reminder that inherited musicological canons can be startlingly, alarmingly durable; that for Anglophone audiences, looking beyond the Pyrenees is also an invitation to reconsider our own operatic foundations.

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Foreign perceptions and productions of Spanish identity are at the heart of Michael Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz's Carmen and the Staging of Spain: Recasting Bizet's Opera in the Belle Epoque. ‘You will think you are in Spain’, declared Blaze de Bury in the Revue des deux mondes shortly after Carmen’s world premiere in 1875, referring to the realism of the Act II sets at the Opéra-Comique.Footnote ¹⁰ As Christoforidis and Kertesz observe, representations of Spain had already been a notable feature of Parisian cultural life since the early nineteenth century, with the French espagnolade and enthusiasm for Spanish song reflecting a continued cultural exchange during the Second Empire (1852–70), encouraged by the presence of the Granada-born Empress Eugénie and epitomised by Théophile Gautier's travel writings. By the 1850s, ideas of Spanish decadence were starting to shift in favour of a more picturesque exoticism centred on Andalusia, but it remained a largely imaginary construct for most Parisians rather than a visited tourist site. Carmen's mixture of Spanish dances, bullfighting and romantic violence thus entered well-trodden cultural territory, even as Bizet's orientalising harmonic strategies and virtuoso orchestration offered both unmistakeable exoticism and an inspiration for later composers. Carmen's notorious failure in 1875 appears largely to have reflected the flawed quality of its performance as well as the opera's tragic ending, rather than especial outrage at its Hispanic violence – even if the revolutionary profile of its heroine likely also unsettled some spectators.Footnote ¹¹

The main focus of Christoforidis and Kertesz's monograph, however, is not Carmen's early reception but rather the opera's reinvention in the following decades, as it moved across cities, continents and artforms, establishing itself as an operatic classic par excellence. After a Parisian overture, the following chapters pursue Carmen's variegated performances in London, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris (again) and New York, taking in iconic interpretations of the title role by Céléstine Galli-Marié, Emma Calvé, Elena Fons, Maria Gay and Geraldine Farrar among others. Equally central to the authors’ project is Carmen's remaking (or ‘recasting’) in different media as the opera's heroine circulates Orlando-like between opéra comique, music hall, grand opera, café chanson, parody, ballet and film. The inherent hybridity of Bizet's Franco-Spanish fantasy, the authors demonstrate, encouraged practitioners in diverse forms and geographical sites to make Carmen their own, capitalising on the opera's alluring mix of narrative realism, diegetic song and Spanish dance music.

As this outline would suggest, the book's locations are to some degree familiar, but they highlight key centres for circulating ideas of Spanishness at this time. The authors make clear from the start that Carmen's Spanish identity was not a ‘fixed, unchanging exotic construc[t]’ but rather an idea reshaped in response to new cultural activities and exchanges, ‘an internationally recognized and constantly updated compilation of clichéd Spanishness’, which Spanish performers also played a significant role in shaping (xvii). Some of the book's most stimulating passages in this context come in an examination of the opera's controversial double premiere in Madrid in 1887–8. Initially scheduled for the Teatro Real, a rivalry between impresarios saw Carmen make its debut instead in Spanish translation at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, the city's showcase for home-grown repertoire. Reactions varied wildly. If aspects of Bizet's work appeared ludicrous and even offensive to Madrid audiences – Act IV, for example, had been reworked before opening night to avoid the absurdity of bullfighters parading outside the bullring – then scenes of fighting tobacco workers could also echo recent protests by real-life cigarreras (female cigarette workers), the latter described by the press as being ‘utterly Spanish’ (100). Bizet's score also provoked mixed responses. Spanish dances and songs were repeatedly encored by audiences but numerous critics declared them hopelessly inauthentic or derivative.

Hearing Carmen initially in Spanish thus clearly heightened critical sensitivity to foreign perceptions of Spain, as internal fashions for costumbrismo – the depiction of bullfighting, flamenco and other Andalusian practices, including their representation in zarzuelas – collided with exaggerated French portrayals. When the opera finally arrived at the Teatro Real a few months later, however, the cultural distance enabled by an Italian translation seems to have smoothed its path to critical acceptance, as did the social distance of the Teatro Real's fashionable audience. As one critic remarked, it was absurd to condemn Carmen but to praise Il barbiere di Siviglia, ‘which is about as Spanish as we are Chinese’ (115). Yet as Christoforidis and Kertesz observe, it is equally difficult to generalise about critical reactions, as regional differences generated widely divergent responses. Carmen's Spanish premiere in Barcelona in 1881 passed with little fanfare in the context of emerging Catalan nationalism, with Andalusia perceived as a basically foreign territory. By the 1890s Carmen was staged in Barcelona both in a popular Spanish-language adaptation and as a parody, Carmela, in which Carmen was an Andalusian migrant in Madrid and Don José a Galician peasant – his origins musically signposted by imitations of the bagpipe. Centre and periphery were now comically reworked; Carmen embraced as a streetwise Spanish woman.

Christoforidis and Kertesz's attention to Carmen's medial leaps forms one of the book's most enjoyable aspects, outlining the extent to which operatic and non-operatic iterations of Carmen were mutually enriching as Bizet's work shifted between high and low, grand opera and popular entertainment. Accounts of parodies in Barcelona and London are followed by studies of actress Olga Nethersole and ballerina Rosario Guerrero, who performed adaptations of the opera in New York and London clearly informed by the international success of Spanish dancers La Belle Otero and Carmencita Dausset (the latter herself the subject of a celebrated portrait by John Singer Sargent). Nethersole in particular became notorious for her ‘Carmen kiss’, so lengthy and frequent in nature that one New York critic remarked, ‘some night Olga will swallow [José] by slow suction, as a snake does a rabbit’ (186).

If transnational mobility was essential to the ongoing evolution of ‘Carmen discourse’, a crucial moment was the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889, which first introduced French audiences to flamenco dancers from Granada: a dance genre still in its infancy when Carmen was premiered but which, significantly, derived from some of the same musical forms that inspired Bizet. Seville had long been the object of exotic fascination for foreigners, but by the late nineteenth century attention had moved to Granada as the location of an uncommodified Spanishness – an ideal of primitive authenticity untainted by modern development and embodied by flamenco. Ironically, however, the style performed at the Exposition was actually an urban phenomenon developed in Madrid and Seville, as well as in the tourist flamenco shows of Granada; one proud Spanish visitor described the performances as ‘prostitution’ (148). Flamenco would soon be incorporated into versions of Carmen internationally, including in Spain as Spanish singers began to claim the role as their own. Elena Fons, the first celebrated Spanish Carmen (and herself from Seville) recorded flamenco extracts in 1908 alongside performing roles such as Desdemona and Santuzza; the highest praise an enthusiastic audience in Salamanca in 1898 could offer was ‘gitana’ (gypsy; 211).

The varied Spanish responses to foreign exoticisation thus form a significant thread in Carmen and the Staging of Spain, which might usefully be read in dialogue with Samuel Llano's recent study, Whose Spain? Negotiating ‘Spanish Music’ in Paris, 1908–1929.Footnote ¹² As Carmen and Spain became ever more familiar, a corresponding desire arose on the part of both Spanish and foreign performers to make Carmen ‘authentic’, even as that ideal could shift away considerably from Bizet's conception. By the 1890s this also reflected the popularity of verismo, a style that (alongside Carmen) would influence the development of Spanish zarzuelas. Emma Calvé's verista Carmen became legendary in Paris, London and New York, although she notably never performed it in Madrid: contracted for a visit at the Teatro Real in 1895, she sang Hamlet and Cavalleria rusticana but cancelled Carmen, pleading personal difficulties; perhaps the pressure was too much. Abandoning the bolero worn by Galli-Marié in favour of a then-fashionable mantón de manila, and celebrated for her passionate acting, Calvé also started a trend for Carmen interpreters to claim Spanish ancestry, with the soprano even taking flamenco classes. This ‘realist’ trend seems to have reached its peak with Geraldine Farrar as Carmen on both stage and screen. While her operatic career brought glamour to her film work, Farrar's on-screen Carmen could offer audiences unprecedentedly intimate visual access to her sensuous, impulsive portrayal. Her subsequent performances at the Metropolitan Opera in turn famously exhibited more aggressive behaviour inspired by the movie.Footnote ¹³

Christoforidis and Kertesz's extensive archival work and attention to different media richly illustrate the productive dialogue between new performance environments and Carmen's Spanishness. A more consistent emphasis throughout on competing definitions of Spanish identity would nonetheless have enriched the book – notwithstanding the authors’ explicit focus on Carmen – as well as clarifying how Carmen's reception might reshape broader histories of the belle époque. Could Spanish culture be seen abroad as an emblem of modernity as well as of folkloric brutality, for example? And to what extent was Carmen's mutability considered symptomatic of ‘Spanish’ cultural production more generally? Some of these issues are partly addressed in the book's final stages, as an idea of Spanish identity wedded to violence (and now linked to Farrar) was counteracted by the Met premiere of Granados's Goyescas (1915), promoted by the composer as radically different from the ‘tawdry boleros and habaneras’ usually associated with Spain (283). Such a gesture towards these wider concerns might also have helped to frame and contextualise the repetitions that surface across the monograph, as similar tropes inevitably re-emerge in different places. How different, for instance, really was the reception of Carmen in London and New York? And might it be more meaningful to talk of networks of Spanishness?

Accounting for similarity and difference is of course a significant challenge for any transnational history of opera. It is one that is to some degree overcome by the authors’ lively prose, as well as by Carmen's sheer allure. Given the authors’ geographical curiosity, however, a Latin American perspective would have been especially welcome to highlight the ambiguous geopolitical position Spain occupied: both a colonial model to be banished and an obvious pathway to European culture. The first performances of Carmen in Buenos Aires in 1881 were given in French (in contrast to Madrid) and later in Italian; Spanish zarzuelas were widely performed in Argentina throughout the 1890s by visiting troupes but soon sidelined by the growth of local theatre companies.Footnote ¹⁴ However attractive the discourse of Spanishness woven and re-woven around Carmen, it always operated alongside alternative models within and beyond Spain – even if Carmen typically won out.

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Zarzuela plays only a bit-part in Christoforidis and Kertesz's study, but it emerges centre stage in Clinton D. Young's Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880–1930. A recent winner of the Robert M. Stevenson prize mentioned earlier, Young's book examines interactions between indigenous Spanish lyric theatre and wider political shifts during the Bourbon Restoration (1874–1931). The stated goal of Young's project is to revise existing studies of nationalism focused largely on the state by shifting attention to cultural production and ‘popular nationalism’, developing a more nuanced understanding of nationalist movements. As he argues, the weak Spanish government made official nationalist projects less effective than in France, Great Britain and Germany during this period due to anxieties around civil unrest following the 1868 revolution. Where the state failed, zarzuela succeeded, Young contends in an argument that draws closely on Benedict Anderson's and Liah Greenfeld's pioneering studies of nationalism, alongside musicological work by Tia DeNora, Jann Pasler and Celia Applegate. As Young declares early on:

Readers expecting a study of circulation may be disappointed, however, as Young's focus is firmly on the relationship between broader political developments and zarzuela's generic evolution as witnessed by individual case studies. A brief introduction outlines Young's interests while considering the funerals of Emilio Arrieta and Francisco Asenjo Barbieri a week apart in Madrid in February 1894: both much-admired zarzuela composers, with one obituary baldly praising Barbieri's music for having ‘the colours of the national flag’. The seven main chapters then re-evaluate the genre's changing profile until its creative demise during the Civil War. Chapter One considers the birth of zarzuela in the 1850s and 1860s against the long-standing dominance of Italian opera at the Teatro Real (the Teatro de la Zarzuela being founded in 1856). Early three-act zarzuelas were strongly influenced by bel canto and opéra comique, with many plots directly borrowed from French works; Offenbach's operettas would arrive in Madrid during the 1860s. Young highlights the use of Spanish folk music and dances for ensemble choral scenes, arguing for a parallel between the increasingly romantic plots of zarzuelas during the 1870s (and reduced choral roles) and the government emphasis on political stability after 1874: ‘coups de théâtre replaced coups d’état on the Spanish stage’ (39).

While full-length zarzuelas turned to romantic storylines, the emergence of one-act (género chico) works during the 1880s soon placed urban life on stage. This was aided by the ‘teatro por horas’ system, offering several short works every evening at a range of price points. Chapters Two and Three consider the use of Spanish and central European dance forms, focusing on works including Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde's La gran vía and Chueca's Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente, together with the move towards more historical plots during the 1890s. Young interprets the use of urban dance music as well as folk forms (such as the jota and seguidilla) as evidence of a wider national consciousness, with contemporary dance music (such as the waltz) sung by all social classes and folk music not exclusively marked as regional: ‘everybody – regardless of class and station – sings music associated with the Spanish people, although that music was not what might have been traditionally thought of as “Spanish”’ (56). Chapters Four and Five examine alternative musical responses to the national humiliation of the Spanish-American war of 1898. On the one hand, a political culture of regeneracionismo encouraged a new degree of cosmopolitanism as reflected in the popularity of Lehár and the use of the polka and foreign settings in zarzuelas. On the other, zarzuelas began to be set in the countryside and in regions beyond Castille, with Andalusia and its gypsies being joined by works set in the Basque region and Galicia. Chapters Six and Seven finally pursue zarzuela's vexed relationship with opera, as zarzuela composers were increasingly conservatory-trained and composed works with more demanding vocal parts and richer orchestrations; Spanish opera in turn began to seem legitimate (enter Granados's Goyescas). By 1926, the Teatro de la Zarzuela had become a state-sponsored theatre. Young interprets these late works as ‘toothless kitsch’: musically inspired, but in Adornian terms a mere replay of earlier forms without relevant political content (20).Footnote ¹⁵ Once attached to a state apparatus, zarzuela's raison d’être disappeared.

Young's broad claim that zarzuela was closely related to Spanish nationalist currents is uncontroversial and to some degree familiar; readers intimate with the genre can hardly fail to recall numbers such as the ‘Canción española’ from Pablo Luna's El niño judío, with its seguidilla form and refrain ‘De España vengo, soy española’ (‘I come from Spain, I am Spanish’).Footnote ¹⁶ But Young's study nonetheless offers a long overdue account of interactions between a shifting political climate and the genre's development, bringing to light some fascinating parallels. Especially successful is Chapter Three's discussion of Chueca and De Burgos's Cádiz (1886), a zarzuela set in 1810 during the French siege, by then a seminal moment in Spanish nationalist historiography. Young situates the work's emphasis on choral scenes and its diversity of dance forms alongside the writings of Miguel de Unamuno during the 1890s, which articulated a version of Spanish nationalism centred emphatically on the people rather than the state. The success of Cádiz both encouraged further historical zarzuelas and eventually led to its highly popular march being the subject of a subsequent zarzuela, La marcha de Cádiz (1896), in which the piece was described as a ‘national hymn’. As Young shows, the extract soon appeared in the press with patriotic lyrics as well as in public concerts; earlier in the year the Spanish queen had already attended a performance of Chueca's original work, a move described by one journalist as the equivalent of giving the composer a Cross of Military Merit. Young convincingly argues that Chueca's work mobilised a sense of patriotic sentiment in the absence of an official national anthem, while being focused on citizens rather than the state at a time of growing frustration with government corruption.

Elsewhere, however, Young is on shakier ground methodologically since he is surprisingly inconsistent in his use of sources. In an appendix, Young muses on the challenges of studying zarzuela repertoire in light of the vast number of works – more than ten thousand (a Digital Humanities dream!) – and the inconsistency of the surviving data:

Young's questions are entirely reasonable and few could argue with his conclusion (his eventual criterion for inclusion was availability on compact disc, a sign of the enduring canonic status of particular works). The difficulties of grappling with such fragmentary yet overwhelmingly large volumes of material should also not be underestimated, and Young notes that ticket and financial records are largely missing. But Young makes remarkably little use of press reception throughout his book – however illuminating the material he does cite – and largely ignores other potential sources such as letters, illustrations, satire, fiction or non-political writings. His book, unusually, contains no images or musical examples despite regular references to musical detail (Louisiana State Press surely bears some responsibility here). A telling instance of Young's hermeneutic approach comes early on, when he discusses the diminishing role for the chorus outlined by Barbieri's Pan y Toros (1864) and El barberillo de Lavapiés (1874):

Young's thesis that the chorus represent the Spanish people and that its changing position can provide ‘audible evidence of zarzuela's depoliticization’ (33) may indeed be correct; but surely not on the basis of the score alone. Part of the difficulty is undoubtedly the challenge of working with materials long associated with escapism, for which critical reports from the time may shed frustratingly little light regarding contemporary meanings. Young acknowledges this difficulty at several points, observing that reviews often focused upon a work's commercial success and that the quality of the music (rather than political metaphors) was usually the determining factor in a work's success. But a sturdier argument might have been constructed for several of his key case studies: from the cosmopolitan worldview associated with the polka and mazurka after 1898, to his claim that ‘[the] point of using folk styles in music was not to create a sense of specific regionalism; it was instead to create a general sense that the various parts of rural Spain were components of a homogeneous whole’ (107–8). Again, perhaps so; but for whom? The composers? The theatre managements? Or was this a move designed to satisfy the position of the audience and/or critics?

To a great degree, these questions centre around two of the words in Young's title: ‘popular nationalism’. Young's ambition to write a ‘bottom-up’ history of nationalism is admirable, even if exploring links between cultural production and nationalist ideology is no longer necessarily novel (Young's professional training and appointment, it may be worth mentioning, is in a History rather than Musicology department). As his monograph unfolds, however, it seems that ‘middle-out’ might be a more apt term, since zarzuela's class position appears less tied to a monolithic ‘people’ in opposition to the state, than to a bourgeois class seeking to define themselves against the aristocracy. ‘Zarzuela composers, who came almost exclusively from bourgeois backgrounds, would be the bridge between the working classes portrayed onstage and the upper-class audience’, Young remarks, in relation to the género chico (49). The term ‘nationalism’ also raises questions. To some extent this is because Young focuses so squarely on Madrid: a logical choice given the zarzuela industry's association with the capital, but one that suggests ‘urban identity’ might at times be a more appropriate name, not least in a genre that was explicitly cosmopolitan from the outset. But more broadly, there is a lingering query throughout over agency and process: the precise actors that shaped the circulation of ideas and imaginaries by which cultural formations were made, remade and recast.Footnote ¹⁷ If the zarzuela industry played a crucial role in shaping a national consciousness in Spain, the interactions between its participants ultimately remains elusive; a sense not just of what zarzuela was, but of how it was used and by whom.

In spite of these issues, Music Theater and Popular Nationalism in Spain, 1880–1930 still has a great deal to offer. As might be expected, Young's command of political detail is excellent and his discussions of individual works filled with sensitive observations and obvious affection. Particularly enjoyable are his explorations of La gran vía, Manuel Fernández Caballero's Gigantes y cabezudos (a work featuring the army's return from the disastrous Cuban war) and Amadeo Vives's Doña Francisquita. This final work appears something of an elegy for the entire genre, its swooningly beautiful music matched to a plot set seventy years earlier. By the time of its premiere in 1923, zarzuela had clearly started to be co-opted by the state; and if the processes by which ‘popular’ and ‘official’ musical nationalism met – and ultimately clashed – are still obscure, Young's book certainly makes a valuable intervention in tracing these broader developments. One of the most widely circulated musical forms in the entire nineteenth century, zarzuela has long deserved sustained attention in Anglophone musicology; Young's book is a fine start.

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The interactions between diverse social groups are at the centre of João Silva's Entertaining Lisbon: Music, Theater, and Modern Life in the Late 19th Century. Silva makes a compelling argument for Lisbon as a multi-layered case study through which to explore links between music theatre and a national imaginary. By the late nineteenth century, Silva shows, the city was a Western European capital yet plagued by anxieties of peripherality; an economically diminished imperial centre following Brazil's independence but one seeking to expand its colonial holdings in Africa (and in competition with the British); one, moreover, linked to Paris and Madrid and exhibiting a vibrant urban culture of its own, while being closely connected to the unindustrialised Portuguese provinces. In drawing upon Walter Benjamin, Silva positions Lisbon as reflecting aspects of both Paris and Naples as portrayed by him: a co-existence of modernity and tradition, urban and rural, local and global, high and low that blurs distinctions between categories revealing instead their co-existence and ‘symbiotic relation’ (287).

It is within these ever-splintering binaries that Silva situates music theatre: a category that here covers both staged performances and theatre's circulation in other musical and visual forms. Indeed, it is precisely theatre's fluidity (or ‘porosity’, to use one of Silva's favoured formulations) between text and act that is central to his thesis, as an urban imaginary was performed, textualised and re-circulated. The Introduction and Chapter One offer a valuable overview of Lisbon's urban development and theatrical infrastructure, highlighting both the city centre's remodelling à la Haussmann and the birth of social sciences in Portugal, which frequently tied the modern Portuguese state to older ideas of Lusitania. Chapter Two builds on these themes to consider the wide range of theatrical venues performing opera, operetta and revista: a musical culture enriched by links with Paris, Madrid and Brazil that regularly brought opéra comique, zarzuela and Brazilian theatre shows to Lisbon. Chapter Three turns to song collection throughout Portugal, outlining emerging distinctions in contemporary thought between the Celtic North and Semitic South in parallel with the urban context of fado songs and highlighting the incorporation of folk music into theatrical performances. Chapter Four focuses on theatrical paraphernalia such as postcards, song books and programmes, exploring the gendered associations of domestic music-making as well as the relationship of theatrical goods to a larger commercial culture. Finally, Chapter Five turns to player pianos and gramophone recordings, investigating the ambiguous position of the Portuguese gramophone industry at a time when discs were marketed to local elites and included a range of Portuguese repertory, but recording plants were all foreign owned, local and global again colliding.

In contrast to Young's monograph – a regular reference point in Chapter Two, in its earlier form as a dissertation – Silva's approach is largely thematic, with individual chapters ranging across several decades (1867–1910). His ambitions are essentially similar, however, in tracing ‘the complex relations between a cultural nation-state and popular entertainment’ (2). Where the two monographs differ most substantially is in the range of their materials and in their relationship to ideas of nationalism. For while Young is keen to assert zarzuela's political agency under a weak Spanish government, Silva's focus is both more diffuse and more theoretically front-loaded, investigating how Portugal was ‘established, presented, developed, and commodified as a modern nation-state’ (293) in the decades preceding the declaration of the Portuguese Republic. The twists and turns of government policy largely take a backseat to different representations of Portuguese life circulating throughout Lisbon, ultimately placing less authorial pressure on the topicality of a given show than cumulatively building a case. Patriotic rhetoric also recedes into the background against the ‘composite image’ (292) of Portuguese modernity generated by the music theatre industry – one in which sounds, sights, texts, performing bodies and the acousmatic voices and hands of the gramophone industry interacted to shape the public's sensory experience of modern life.

The ephemerality of some of these materials is a key challenge of any such project. Revistas and parodies rarely survive in complete versions and were in any case regularly updated, making them both immensely valuable documents of nineteenth-century urban life and frustratingly elusive.Footnote ¹⁸ This difficulty is tackled most obviously in the long Chapter Two, where Silva's discussion of seasons at the Real Teatro de São Carlos – a cosmopolitan venue centred largely on Italian works, but occasionally featuring operas by local composers such as Alfredo Keil – is matched by overviews of operetta and revista venues. Silva draws upon a wide range of sources to illustrate how revistas ‘included, absorbed and metabolized everyday life’ (118), such as press reviews, surviving scripts and musical excerpts, and a nine-page report by journalist André Brun entitled O teatro por dentro (The Theatre from Inside) published in the magazine Ilustração portuguesa in 1908, which details rehearsal and performance conventions at the Teatro Avenida. Policemen, lawyers, politicians, journalists, maids and servants might appear alongside allegorical figures to create an explicitly metatheatrical and discontinuous contemporary spectacle. After the British Ultimatum of 1890, the scope for political satire was reduced due to censorship and revistas increasingly focused on social mores and visual effects, including erotic titillation, but Silva indicates how they remained key vehicles for introducing musical genres such as the cakewalk or Brazilian maxixe. The revista Tim tim por tim tim (1889) was eventually performed thousands of times, touring to Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities from 1892 onwards. One sketch personified the Brazilian Song and the Portuguese Song, the former laden with sexual innuendo reflecting the exoticisation of Portugal's former colony. Silva's claim that ‘the “national” does not occupy a fixed and predetermined space in the system’ is thus reinforced; it instead inhabits ‘a contingent and contested place between the local and global … embedded in the transience of modern life’ (146–7).

In light of these fragmentary materials, it is a shame that Silva does not linger longer over works such as Tição negro that exist in complete versions; indeed, the sceptical reader may begin to wonder if further extant Portuguese works do await rediscovery. Some more detailed case studies might also have militated against some awkward pacing and a degree of internal repetition, although the superb and generous illustrations do excellent work throughout. The sensitivity of Silva's historical approach is nonetheless born out in later chapters, where he highlights the movement of theatrical music into domestic settings as well as the incorporation of songs into revistas. Distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music are deeply problematic, Silva outlines, as folk music was reworked for urban consumption and theatrical songs were disseminated to the provinces, while urban fado were explicitly nostalgic in tone.Footnote ¹⁹ The line between urban and rural was repeatedly shaped by aesthetic practice. In a similar vein, postcards and recordings could document both operatic performances and folk groups, functioning (in Benedict Anderson's terms) as a vehicle for defining and distributing a national identity. The materials that Silva uncovers from the gramophone industry are especially tantalising and again challenge ideas of centre and periphery within and beyond Lisbon. The Companhia Franceza do Gramophone took Portuguese artists to Paris to record in the early 1900s, its catalogue including fado and Portuguese band music alongside Italian operas (imported from the company's international catalogue) and the Brazilian national anthem. Another example of the weak hold of the ‘national’, and a reminder that cosmopolitanism could exist in many forms.

* * *

Silva finishes his book with an ode to pleasure, remarking that it ‘acted as a facilitator for the modern nation to become naturalized and internalized’ (292). Earlier Silva had distinguished between pleasure and jouissance, asserting that the particular pleasure of revistas ‘is contained and delimited within the symbolic order’, even as revistas were sufficiently ‘multivocal’ to contain diverse elements of modern life (146).Footnote ²⁰ That diversity, as Christoforidis, Kertesz and Young elsewhere also remind us, comprised a dizzying variety of ethnic groups, classes, ages and genders, both real and imagined. All of these were susceptible to theatrical representation, and these representations could by turns reinforce and reshape the political status quo, offering escapism, familiarity, novelty, exoticism and subversion. Delight in both similarity and social difference was not exclusive to audiences of Carmen: it reflected the multiplicity of late nineteenth-century urban modernity, as well as music theatre's attempts to both contain and reflect it. Indeed, I would suggest that issues of pleasure and jouissance are ultimately central to all three of the monographs under review: as means by which local, national and transnational imaginaries were generated and consumed, and competing identities mutually defined.

Opera studies probably needs no reminding that pleasure and desire have long been central to musical history. Nor should issues of pleasure be relegated to studies of Spain and Portugal; similar themes might easily be raised in relation to the operettas of Lehár or Kálmán. But focusing on Iberian music theatre and its reception through the lens of enjoyment can nevertheless be especially instructive: not as just another re-inscription of familiar links between the European South and bodily pleasure, but rather as a reminder of the joys of diversion, of witnessing and performing alternative identities, and of wandering off the scholarly beaten track. Exploring alternative narratives of nineteenth-century operatic history might not just offer a valuable lesson, in other words, but also provide its own academic form of pleasurable adventure.