La Parranda: Carlos Masberger's 1928 Zarzuela Cover for La Farsa
La Parranda is a zarzuela in three acts by Luis Fernández Ardavín, with music by Francisco Alonso, premiered at Madrid's Teatro Calderón on April 26, 1928, and published as number 36 of La Farsa. Its famous cover, a woman's face framed by concentric circles, was drawn by Carlos Masberger in 1926. Enlarged as wall art, it stands as a striking work of vintage Spanish poster art from the Art Deco period.
No dancers, no lovers, no stage set. Just a face, eyes closed, floating at the center of three concentric rings like a target in coral, teal, and gold. For La Parranda, the illustrator Carlos Masberger threw out everything a theatre cover was supposed to show and produced the most purely graphic image in the whole La Farsa series, a face you can recognize across a room and cannot forget afterward.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 36, Madrid, 1928 (Rivadeneyra)
- Premiered: Teatro Calderón, Madrid, April 26, 1928
- Libretto: Luis Fernández Ardavín
- Music: Francisco Alonso
- Cover art: Carlos Masberger (drawn 1926)
- Style: Spanish Art Deco cover design; vintage Spanish graphic art
A Zarzuela from the Murcian Huerta
La Parranda is a zarzuela in three acts with a libretto by Luis Fernández Ardavín and music by Francisco Alonso, one of the most crowd pleasing composers of the Spanish lyric stage. It premiered at Madrid's Teatro Calderón on April 26, 1928, and was published the same year as issue number 36 of La Farsa, the weekly 50 céntimo collection. Where most zarzuelas of the period are set in a romanticized Madrid, La Parranda belongs to Murcia, to the irrigated orchard country of the huerta, its farmhouses, its harvest festivals, and its fiercely local pride. Its famous number, the Canto a Murcia, became a regional hymn in all but name and is still encored whenever the work is staged. A parranda, in Murcian usage, is a spree, a night of music and celebration, and the opera's world is that of a community that sings its identity out loud.
From the Collection
La Parranda, La Farsa Cover Print, 1928
Cover of La Farsa nº 36 (1928): Fernández Ardavín and Francisco Alonso's Murcian zarzuela, drawn by Carlos Masberger.
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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
Keep Reading
Carlos Masberger and the 1926 Drawing
The signature sits at the lower left of the design, MASBERGER in a looping hand, and beside it, at the right, a date: 1926. That date is one of the small mysteries of this cover. The zarzuela did not reach the stage until 1928, so Masberger's drawing predates the premiere by two years, which suggests the image began life as an independent design and was adopted for the booklet, or that the artwork was commissioned well ahead of publication. Carlos Masberger, whose surname period sources also spell Mansberger, was a name illustrator of the Madrid popular press, counted among the star cover artists of the novel weekly La Novela de Hoy alongside Penagos, and he drew more than one La Farsa cover: the theatre collections specialist Juan Ballester credits him with the cover of the collection's Hernani in the same year. He drew a second cover in our set as well, La Morería, where the same concentric rings return.
The Canto a Murcia and the Huerta
Nearly a century after its premiere, La Parranda survives in Spanish memory largely through a single number, the Canto a Murcia, the tenor's hymn to the Murcian land that closes the work's first act in a blaze of regional pride. Songs like this had a function in the zarzuela economy. A hit number escaped the theatre and lived independently, in cafés, at festivals, and in the mouths of people who never saw the full work, carrying the show's fame with it. The Canto a Murcia went further than most. Murcia adopted it as something close to an unofficial anthem, and it is still performed wherever Murcians gather to celebrate themselves, which in Murcia is a well developed art.
The world the song praises is the huerta, the irrigated garden country around the city, a landscape of orange groves, farmhouses called barracas, and smallholdings watered by a network of channels whose origins reach back to Islamic Spain. Fernández Ardavín's libretto sets its romances and rivalries among the huerta's people, and Alonso, a composer with a famously direct line to popular taste, fills the score with the sounds of that festive world. Francisco Alonso understood the Spanish audience as well as any composer of his generation, and La Parranda shows his instinct for the local: give a region a mirror, a melody, and a night of celebration, and it will keep your zarzuela alive for a hundred years. Masberger's cover, notably, does none of this storytelling. It trusts a single beautiful face to carry the whole huerta, and the century since suggests he was right.
Reading the Face
The face is drawn with a beauty mark at the cheek and another at the chin, rouged lips, and eyelids lowered in an expression that hovers between serenity and trance, as if the woman is listening to music only she can hear. Around her, the rings do the compositional work that a stage would do on other covers: they are halo, bullseye, and sound wave at once. Masberger sets the whole device on a black square over the booklet's yellow ground, so the cover reads like a small abstract painting pinned to a kiosk wall. It is the clearest demonstration in the series that these 50 céntimo booklets were a genuine school of Spanish Art Deco, a place where commercial illustrators could test how far flat color and geometry could go. In the shop, this cover is the one with a second edition in a different edit, the variant listing in our catalog, because the image has proved strong enough to carry more than one presentation.
From Gouache to Kiosk: The Life of the 1926 Drawing
Masberger's face began, in 1926, as a painting, almost certainly in gouache, the opaque watercolor that was the commercial illustrator's standard medium across Europe. Gouache dries matte, covers completely, and lets an artist lay one flat color cleanly over another, which made it perfect for work destined to be color separated by hand. Nobody knows where the original painting is now; the survival rate for commercial originals of this period is dismal, since shops treated them as production material and discarded them freely. What survives is the printed translation, and the translation here is unusually faithful to the spirit of the design, because the design was born flat.
The separation process would have gone like this. Working from the original, the shop's craftsmen prepared a printing surface for each ink, redrawing the shapes that belonged to that color and leaving the rest blank, a kind of artisanal Photoshop performed with brushes, lithographic crayons, and photographic blocks. The face's delicate modeling, the blush on the cheeks, the shadowed eyelids, could not survive that process as continuous tone, so it is rendered in the original as flat shapes already, color laid in distinct steps. Masberger knew exactly what the press would do to his drawing, and he pre-flattened it himself. The two year gap between the drawing's date and the zarzuela's premiere makes this cover a small case study in how publishers worked: artwork was stock, held and reused, and a strong face drawn in 1926 could wait patiently for the production it fit. It found a Murcian one.
From Kiosk to Collection
Our La Parranda booklet came out of the same outdoor book market in Madrid where the founding La Farsa group surfaced together, the little run of librettos that became the first Vintage Print Project prints and the reason the shop exists. The cover is reproduced in our Spanish Art Deco collection alongside its six companions from that find. The Museo de la Ciudad in Murcia has documented the zarzuela's place in Murcian musical folklore in its Veredas de Música exhibition research.
This is the one cover in the set that the shop carries in two print editions: the textured restoration featured here, and an expanded edit of the same Masberger design.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
