2023-07-14 06:01:24
Composer and conductor Thomas Breton He was one of the most popular characters in Spain at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. When the magazine ‘Blanco y Negro’ submitted to a popular vote in 1902 who were the five most famous people in the country, his name appeared along with the bullfighter Antonio Fuentes, the politician Sagasta and the artists Benlliure and Sorolla.
During his life he frequented the Academy of Fine Arts, the Ateneo de Madrid (as a Mason of the highest degree), the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the Madrid Conservatory, of which he was director for 20 years. A century after his death, the National Library celebrates his figure with an exhibition, ‘Tomás Bretón, much more than La verbena de la Paloma’, available from today to October 22. ‘The vervain of the Pigeon‘ had several film adaptations, one in 1921 for which the maestro made the sound part and another in 1935, which would make Benito Perojo’s film the most popular in the entire Second Republic. But it was necessary to point it out from the zarzuela that invoked him as a popular idol.
It is insisted on remembering his operatic facet, consolidated since his first work in 1889, ‘The lovers of Teruel‘, with which he revealed his literary influences, especially Romanticism. In the original manuscript on display you can see the later translation of the work into Italian, necessary, paradoxically, for its premiere in Madrid.
“He lived the theater from a very young age,” says Víctor Sánchez, curator of the exhibition and doctorate in the figure of the teacher. «Here is the first work, this marvelous manuscript, which he wrote when he was barely 15 years old. A string quartet in which he already showed how well he handled music and the compositional capacity that he had, “says Sánchez. The exhibition gives an account of the good condition of the originals, such as the lyrical libretto of ‘La verbena de la Paloma’, under whose title it reads «Or the apothecary and the chulapas, and poorly repressed jealousy».
Among the select jewels prepared in the exhibition, there is a newspaper from the time in which he received a scholarship from the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts, residing in Rome, Milan, Vienna and Paris. Said document was in the closet of the house of one of Bretón’s grandchildren. Upon his death, the National Library acquired it at auction. Opened on its first page, the first lines say the following: «At 7:30 p.m. I left Madrid in the company of my wife, son, mother, deeply impressed! A city as nice as Madrid is not left without emotion! !». He was not without reason a pleasantly popular character. Phrases like “Where are you going with a Manila shawl?» and «The townspeople also have their little hearts…», both from ‘The vervain of the Pigeon‘.
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