La Manola del Portillo: Roberto's 1928 La Farsa Zarzuela Cover
La Manola del Portillo is a zarzuela in three acts by Emilio Carrere and Francisco García Pacheco, with music by Pablo Luna, premiered at the Teatro Pavón in Madrid on January 21, 1928, and published as number 22 of La Farsa. Its cover, signed “Roberto”, shows the manola Paloma in the Madrid of 1808. The cover is a compact example of Spanish Art Deco design applied to popular theatre, and a collectible piece of vintage Spanish graphic art.
The couple on this cover are not dancing. They are hanging. Thin black strings run from their wrists and heads up out of the picture, because Roberto, the illustrator, drew the lovers of La Manola del Portillo as marionettes, an 18th century lady in a tall white headdress and a gallant in a pink frock coat, posed against a black stage flat. It is a witty cover for a zarzuela that is itself about a city playing a deadly serious game: Madrid in 1808, in the months before it rose against Napoleon's army.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 22, Madrid, February 4, 1928 (Rivadeneyra)
- Premiered: Teatro Pavón, Madrid, January 21, 1928
- Libretto: Emilio Carrere and Francisco García Pacheco
- Music: Pablo Luna
- Cover art: signed “Roberto” (identity unconfirmed)
- Style: 1920s Spanish commercial illustration of the Art Deco era
Carrere, García Pacheco, and Pablo Luna
The libretto is by Emilio Carrere, working with Francisco García Pacheco. Carrere was the poet laureate of bohemian Madrid, the writer who chronicled the city's taverns, pawnshops, and night owls, and a manola, a working class Madrilenian girl in her shawl and carnations, was exactly his home territory. The music is by Pablo Luna, one of the most prolific zarzuela composers of the age, famous for El niño judío and for bringing a Viennese operetta polish to the Spanish stage. La Manola del Portillo premiered at the Teatro Pavón on January 21, 1928, and appeared weeks later as issue number 22 of La Farsa, the weekly Rivadeneyra collection that put current theatre into pocket format for 50 céntimos. The story follows Paloma, the manola of the Portillo gate, and the bullfighter Juan Montes, and builds toward the popular uprising against the French, the same Madrid of Goya's Third of May, filtered through a love story.
From the Collection
La Manola del Portillo, La Farsa Cover Print, 1928
Cover of La Farsa nº 22 (1928): Carrere and García Pacheco's zarzuela with music by Pablo Luna, drawn by Roberto.
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VIEW THE PRINTPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″×18″, 20″×30″, 24″×36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days
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The Madrid of 1808
The love story in La Manola del Portillo plays out against one of the defining episodes in Spanish history. In May 1808, Madrid rose against the French army that had occupied the city, in the uprising remembered as the Dos de Mayo. The fighting was brief and brutally suppressed, the reprisals of May 3 were painted by Goya into two of the most famous canvases in Spanish art, and the revolt lit the fuse of the Peninsular War. For Madrilenians, 1808 became the city's founding myth of itself: the moment when ordinary people, the majos and manolas of the working class districts, defended Madrid while institutions faltered. A manola was not simply a girl in a shawl. She was the female emblem of that defiant popular Madrid, painted by Goya, sung in tonadillas, and carried into zarzuela as a ready made heroine.
Carrere knew this mythology from the inside. His Madrid was the taverns and tenements of the same southern districts, Embajadores and Lavapiés, where the Portillo of the title stood, and his poetry had spent years arguing that the soul of the city lived in its poorest streets. Setting his manola in 1808 let him write about his own Madrid in costume, its courage, its slang, and its suspicion of foreign power, for an audience of 1928 that still told the Dos de Mayo story as family history. The Pavón audience did not need the plot explained. They needed Paloma to pick up the threads of the old story, which is one more reason Roberto's puppet cover is so apt: in 1808, Madrid decided to cut the strings.
Roberto Signs Again
As with La Aventurera, the cover is signed simply Roberto, lower left this time, and the hand is the same: figures assembled from flat paper cutout shapes, faces reduced to dots and dashes, color used in broad heraldic blocks of pink, turquoise, and yellow. The puppet device does double work here. A manola and her gallant as toys on strings is charming, and it is also quietly pointed in a story about a populace being manipulated by empires until it cuts its own strings. Whether Roberto intended that reading, the image earns it. Who Roberto was remains the collection's open question. He worked in the Rivadeneyra stable alongside illustrators including Barbero, whose Las Alondras cover shows the house style from a more rhythmic angle, but no full name has yet been attached to the signature.
The Lettering Is the Brand
Look at the top of this cover and you are looking at one of the most durable pieces of graphic design in Spanish publishing: the LA FARSA masthead, with its jaunty A, part letter, part little house, drawn to be recognized at the distance of a street. Mastheads like this were not set in type. They were drawn by hand, once, by a lettering artist, and then reproduced on every issue as a printing block, a fixed piece of the publisher's identity in an age before logos were called logos. The same is true of the title lettering at the foot of each cover, which changed from issue to issue and was drawn to suit the subject, sober roman capitals here, to match the 1808 setting.
Rivadeneyra understood what it was building. A weekly series lives or dies on recognition, and the La Farsa covers wrap every different illustrator's work inside the same frame of signals: the drawn masthead, the colored border or band, the author and composer credits set in type, and the price, 50 céntimos, printed as proudly as any other element. Inside that frame, Roberto could be as eccentric as he liked, because the frame told the buyer what the object was before the picture said anything at all. It is an early lesson in series design that modern publishers still follow, and it is part of why these booklets read as a family even across seven very different covers. When the collection passed from Rivadeneyra to the publisher Estampa in the 1930s, the masthead survived the change of ownership intact. Brands, it turns out, were already forever.
A Design Built Like a Stage Set
The composition is pure theatre. The arched frame is a proscenium. Behind the figures, a jagged black silhouette reads as stage scenery, a city skyline, or the wings of a set, depending on how long you look. The mustard ground of the booklet does the work of footlights. Covers like this were the poster's smaller cousins: they had to sell a show from a kiosk, in a glance, to people who might never see the production. Reproduced as a print, the cover keeps that directness. It is one of the seven La Farsa covers in our Spanish Art Deco collection, all of them rescued from the same Madrid book market find, the fragile little run of librettos that started Vintage Print Project. The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes offers background on Carrere's theatrical world in its study of Emilio Carrere and the theatre.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
