La Morería: Carlos Masberger's 1928 Zarzuela Cover for La Farsa
La Morería is a zarzuela by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, with music by Rafael Millán, adapted from Julio Dantas' Portuguese play A Severa and premiered at Madrid's Teatro de la Latina on April 20, 1928; it appeared as number 38 of La Farsa. Its cover was drawn by Carlos Masberger, whose signature and the date 1928 sit beneath the title band on the original booklet. It is also a piece of vintage Spanish artwork with a Portuguese soul, theatre art from the high years of Spanish Art Deco publishing.
Of the seven covers in our La Farsa set, this is the strangest, and it rewards a second look. A smiling figure in a polka dot costume stands inside rings of coral, green, and gold, arms raised, balancing a round tray on which rests a small, serene woman's face. It looks like a music hall trick. It is actually a piece of symbolism about one of the great legends of Portuguese music, retold for a Madrid audience: the story of Maria Severa and the birth of fado.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 38, Madrid, May 26, 1928 (Rivadeneyra)
- Premiered: Teatro de la Latina, Madrid, April 20, 1928
- Libretto: Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, after Julio Dantas' A Severa
- Music: Rafael Millán
- Cover art: Carlos Masberger (signed, dated 1928)
- Style: Spanish Art Deco theatre art; 1920s Spanish illustration
From A Severa to La Morería
The zarzuela is by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, the librettists of Las Alondras, adapted from A Severa, the celebrated play by the Portuguese writer Julio Dantas. The music is by Rafael Millán. It premiered at Madrid's Teatro de la Latina on April 20, 1928, and La Farsa published it weeks later, on May 26, 1928, as issue number 38. The title names the Mouraria, the old Moorish quarter of Lisbon, where Maria Severa Onofriana kept a tavern in the 19th century, sang the songs that were becoming fado, loved a bullfighting aristocrat, and died young in 1846. In Portugal she is the founding myth of the national music, a figure somewhere between history and folklore. Romero and Fernández Shaw's adaptation carried that Lisbon legend across the border and naturalized it as a Spanish zarzuela, one of the era's many acts of theatrical exchange between the two capitals.
From the Collection
La Morería, La Farsa Cover Print, 1928
Cover of La Farsa nº 38 (1928): the Lisbon fado legend adapted by Romero and Fernández Shaw, drawn by Carlos Masberger.
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- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², pigment inks
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Severa and the Soul of Fado
The woman on Masberger's tray deserves her own introduction. Maria Severa Onofriana (1820 to 1846) was a tavern keeper and singer in Lisbon's Mouraria quarter who became, after her early death, the founding legend of fado, Portugal's music of fate and longing. Tradition makes her tall, striking, and fearless, singing in her tavern doorway for sailors, bullfighters, and slumming aristocrats, and loving a nobleman, the Count of Vimioso, across every barrier the rigid Lisbon of the 1840s could raise. How much is document and how much is myth is almost beside the point. Portugal needed a mother for its national song, and Severa, dead at twenty six, was cast for eternity.
Julio Dantas fixed the legend in 1901 with his play A Severa, which became one of the most performed works in the Portuguese theatre and, in 1931, the first Portuguese sound film. When Romero and Fernández Shaw adapted it for Madrid in 1928, they were importing not just a plot but a piece of Portuguese national mythology, and Spanish audiences took to it warmly enough that La Morería earned its place in the La Farsa series within weeks of the premiere. Fado itself went on to be inscribed by UNESCO on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011, carried there by twentieth century voices like Amália Rodrigues, who always acknowledged Severa as the source. Every element of that long story is folded into this small cover: the Lisbon quarter in the title, the singer's face presented like a relic, and a Madrid illustrator trying to draw what Portuguese longing looks like.
Masberger Signs Under the Band
For a long time this cover looked unsigned. The signature is there, but it hides in small print just below the LA FARSA title band on the physical booklet, MASBERGER with the date 1928, a placement our large print scan originally cropped away. It is Carlos Masberger again, the illustrator of La Parranda, and he uses the same device in both covers: concentric rings as a stage, a halo, and a target. Here the rings frame a figure who reads as part bullfighter's muse, part saint in a modern altarpiece, polka dots scattered over the costume like the pattern of a mantón. The little face on the tray is Severa herself, presented to the audience as an icon, a head offered up by her own legend. It is a bold, slightly surreal piece of commercial art, and it shows how far the La Farsa covers could travel from simple scene illustration.
Cheap Paper, Bright Color, and a Century of Survival
Everything about a La Farsa booklet was engineered for a short life. The paper was the cheapest stock that would take ink, full of the wood pulp acids that yellow and embrittle with age, and the binding was a couple of staples or a stitched spine meant to survive a few readings, not a century. By every intention of its makers, this object should not exist anymore. That any copies survive at all is a story of neglect in the best sense: bundles tied with string, boxes in attics, stock forgotten in the back rooms of bookshops, the quiet dark places where paper enemies, light, damp, and readers, could not reach.
The colors are the other surprise. The inks of Spanish commercial printing in this period were often simple, even crude, but they were heavily pigmented, and pigment is stubborn. Kept in the dark, the coral, green, and gold of this cover can look nearly as saturated as the week they were printed, even as the paper around them darkens to the tone of strong tea. That contrast, fugitive paper and faithful ink, is the central problem in restoring these covers for print. Our editions work from the original booklets and take a conservative path: the cover is cleaned and its color balanced, but the texture of the aged paper is left in the image, because at this point the paper's century is part of the artwork. A La Morería printed on bright white stock would be a different, lesser object: all Lisbon longing, no dust. The dust is documentary.
Two Capitals, One Song
The cultural traffic behind this booklet runs both ways. Spanish zarzuela companies toured Portugal constantly, Portuguese plays were adapted in Madrid, and a Lisbon tavern singer could become the heroine of a Madrid premiere within a few years of Dantas writing her story. Scholars of the genre have traced exactly this route for La Morería, using it as a case study of how lyric theatre moved between the two countries. For a print on a wall, none of that needs to be known to enjoy the image, the rings, the dots, and the smile see to that. But it is satisfying that the oddest cover in our set also carries the deepest story. The booklet came from the Madrid outdoor book market find that started Vintage Print Project, and the print sits with its companions in our Spanish Art Deco collection. The scholarly chapter on this zarzuela's journey from Lisbon to Madrid is available from Iberoamericana Vervuert.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
