While Spain knows its "Golden Age", a musical genre is born north of Madrid in the "Palace of the Ronceraie" (or Palacio de la Zarzuela, "zarzas" meaning "brambles" in Spanish), a former hunting lodge, where sumptuous spectacles are given, which take the same name as their place of welcome: zarzuelas. While the opera is in its infancy in Italy, the seventeenth century Spanish stands out through its own operatic pieces based on librettos of Pedro Calderón, a true founder of the classics of Greek-Latin mythology, and music by Juan Hidalgo, then Sebastián Durón and Antonio Literes in the 18th century.
The zarzuela then extends also to the popular Iberian theaters and to the Americas thanks to the compositions of José de Nebra and Antonio Rodríguez de Hita, or to the librettos of Ramón de la Cruz. It is only after one hundred and fifty years of uninterrupted glory that the "baroque" zarzuela, like Spain, will experience at the end of the eighteenth century an eclipse which will oblige it to renew itself ... This unpublished study presents for the very first time the origins of this "continent of music" in its entirety that was zarzuela in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, supplemented by numerous illustrations and annexes.