In 18th-century Spain, the Bourbon Monarchy was converting Italian opera into court entertainment, while an indigenous tradition of music and drama – sainetes (comic opera), tonadillas (musical theatre songs), entremeses (short farces) and jácaras (songs of Arab origin) – was taking hold. After what many composers and intellectuals considered to be an “invasion” of Italian music, a royal order was published in 1799, prohibiting the performance of songs and dances not in Spanish; this led to many translations of Italian and French operas, while the staged tonadilla underwent a crisis.

The French occupation saw a blossoming of political musical theatre, hymns, patriotic songs and “national” dances (tiranas, flamenco polo songs, boleros, fandangos and solo dance cachuchas), while, paradoxically, Joseph Bonaparte’s “intruder government” reorganized existing institutions in a more national way: the Chapel Royal was reorganized, public funding for Spanish opera was provided and a conservatoire was founded. During the War of Independence, the Cádiz Cortes launched a nationalistic, bourgeois cultural project, strengthening interest in popular music even while a polarity between castizo (“pure” or  “authentic”) and Italian culture was perpetuated.

With the return of Ferdinand VII’s absolutism, the 1799 royal order was repealed, bel canto invaded the theatres in the turbulent wake of Rossini, and many composers went into exile in Paris and London for political reasons, fostering the myth of Romantique Espagne. The auto-exotic local colour of La mirada del otro (how others see us) started to take shape through music; Andalusia became its symbol, while the dance forms of the Escuela Bolera achieved success. Outstanding composers of the period were Fernando Sor (1778–1839), Manuel García (1773–1832),  Ramón Carnicer (1789–1855) and José Melchor Gomis (1791–1836), with an interesting catalogue of Italian and French operas, songs, guitar music and tonadillas. The Real Conservatorio de Música y Declamación in Madrid was founded in 1830 and eventually became a training centre for singers of Italian opera. There was still debate as to whether Spanish was a suitable language for opera; with no Spanish libretti it was impossible to establish a national opera. Meanwhile, populist-leaning salon music included some castizo, and eventually national, musical stereotypes generated by interaction between composers, performers and audience.

When Ferdinand VII died in 1833, the liberals came to power; they felt the need to highlight the concept of nationhood by constructing traditions and symbols from folklore and history. The new bourgeois musical societies gave birth to Romantic zarzuela (lyric drama), a burlesque form of sainete with music, in the tradition of the tonadilla and vaudeville. Santiago Masarnau (1805–1882) and Joaquín Espín y Guillén (1812–1881) produced propaganda defending Spanish music, and printed collections of popular songs proliferated. There was no shortage of works defending the national opera (José Ríus, Ópera española: Ventajas que la lengua castellana ofrece para el melodrama, 1840), but composers continued setting Italian libretti to music. When Isabella II reached the age of majority in 1843, the moderate government imposed state centralization, envisaging nationhood as the supreme force as public life and aiming to create a homogeneous, national cultural space. The first histories of Spanish music were published. Among the arts, music offered a possibility of balance between performance and interaction, a musical taste as propagated with nationalizing elements taken from folk tradition (favouring the folklore of south-central Spain), a sense of purity and authenticity, and a bourgeois-Romantic spirit. The emphasis on the purity and authenticity of the south was nothing new, but in the mid-19th century the concept of Andalusian cultural values spread across the fields of theatre (comedies, sainetes and zarzuelas), poetry, dance and salon music (songs, dances and piano fantasies).

Public music (symphonies and opera) brought the nation to wider attention. The main arena for discussion was musical theatre, where it was difficult to reach a consensus either on choosing between opera (through-sung Romantic dramas) and zarzuela (performed in Spanish and including spoken dialogue), or as to which operatic model to follow. The opening of the Teatro Real in 1851 was followed in 1856 by the inauguration of the privately funded Teatro de la Zarzuela, which enshrined the restoration of zarzuela that had started in 1851 with Barbieri’s Jugar con fuego; in 2 or 3 acts, this was a comedy of intrigue, combining local colour (quaint choruses and dance), costumbrismo (including authentic characters and libretti), Italian vocal technique (arias and concertante pieces) and the dramatic model of French comic opera.

Zarzuela formed a fundamental ingredient of the national construction project while the Unión Liberal was in power. Although some of the elite criticized its lack of “authenticity” and its localism, the genre gained popularity, to the extent that as a business model it was exported to Latin America. Judging from the number of identified arenas, performances and premieres per theatre season, in the middle of the 19th century zarzuela was the leading mass cultural product, modern and yet anchored in tradition, expressing a sympathetic view of the working classes and the social consensus required for political stability. Bourgeois librettists and composers created popular characters – idealized and even mythical, which were accepted by the lower classes. There was a large, dynamic audience for zarzuela, eventually bridging the class divide. The Italianism of romances and concertante pieces was immaterial, as was the fact that libretti were sometimes the reworking of French originals. Zarzuela fed on multiple musical references: European dance (waltz, mazurka and schottische – later to become the chotis of Madrid), Creole tunes (habaneras, guajiras and tangos), traditional Spanish music (seguidillas, fandangos and caleseras) and popular music (jotas, muñeiras, zortzicos), together with romances and concertante forms. This strengthened and gave publicity to sound stereotypes developed from salon music, and these were joined by new ones that forged a “Spanish sound”. Prominent composers were Francisco A. Barbieri, Rafael Hernando, Joaquín Gaztambide, Emilio Arrieta, José Inzenga, Cristóbal Oudrid and Manuel Fernández Caballero.

Zarzuela underwent its first crisis in 1866, with the arrival of opéra bouffe from Paris; this combined satire, visual effects, music and dance, and its golden years came after the 1868 revolution. The Bourbon Restoration of 1874 was accompanied by powerful centralization amid intense national debate on the country’s decadence and the need for cultural regeneration. Against this background the “national opera” debate was revived, together with another polemic, Wagnerism. The major ideologues of regenerationist musical nationalism were Barbieri and Felip Pedrell; they were also exceptional musicologists who promoted the publication of old music and song collections. Disagreements arose over the commercial viability of opera or melodrama and the question of aesthetic models; they were aggravated by the fact that the Teatro Real had no state funding and put on Italian opera.

In Por nuestra música (1891), Pedrell proposed merging Wagnerian techniques, popular song and historical music into an essentialist nationalism, which he put into practice in Els Pirineus, an opera with a Catalan libretto that was turned into a paradigm of Spanish nationalism by French Hispanists such as Henri Collet. Barbieri thought it was more practical to strengthen and modernize zarzuela grande. This was adopted by Ruperto Chapí, with the support of the critic Antonio Peña y Goñi, adding depth first with elements of melodrama and naturalism (La bruja, 1887), and then of realism (El duque de Gandía, 1894; Curro Vargas, 1898; and La cara de Dios, 1899). Other composers preferred more eclectic opera, highlights being Los amantes de Teruel (1884) and La Dolores (1895) by Bretón, Albéniz’s Pepita Jiménez (1896) or María del Carmen by Granados (1898). In addition to the Wagner-influenced operas of Albéniz, 11 works by Granados ranged from rural, realistic drama to modernism. In other words, there was no lack of engagement among musicians, simply insufficient consensus and paradigms. The repertoire of symphonic music is interesting: “characteristic fantasies”, symphonies with Austrian and German influences (Tomás Bretón and Miguel Marqués), symphonic poems (Pedrell and Manrique de Lara) and symphonic music of the Alhambrist genre (Chapí and Bretón) combining exoticism with Andalusian and French influences. Salon music featured Moorish song and the first Lieder based on poetry of the Bécquer school. The period 1890-1900 featured the lyric sainete, one-act zarzuelas that created new consumer habits (“theatre by the hour”), combining humour, local colour, costumbrismo, action, fashionable dance and topical politics, extending “downwards” the social base of zarzuela and constructing a flamenco– and Madrid-centred paradigm (La verbena de la Paloma, El puñao de rosas, La revoltosa). Prominent here are Chapí, Bretón, Federico Chueca and Gerónimo Giménez. It is sometimes claimed that this was a symbol of the country’s cultural decadence, while ignoring its transgressive elements, nationalizing potential (reuse of pre-existing music, including that of the folk tradition) and its ability to generate mass popular patriotism that remained powerful until well into the 20th century.