Las Alondras: Antonio Barbero's 1927 Zarzuela Cover for La Farsa
Las Alondras is a zarzuela by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, with music by Jacinto Guerrero, premiered at Madrid's Teatro Apolo on November 16, 1927, and published as number 15 of La Farsa. Its cover, drawn by Antonio Barbero Núñez, shows a chorus line of Parisian midinettes in red, black, and grey green. It belongs to the brief golden age of vintage Spanish artwork made for the theatre kiosks, when Spanish Art Deco illustration reached a mass audience every week.
Seven dancers move across this cover in red dresses and red heels, knees lifted in the same beat, heads turned at the same angle, and not one of them has a face worth the name. That is the point. For Las Alondras, issue number 15 of Madrid's weekly theatre collection La Farsa, the illustrator Antonio Barbero was not drawing seven women. He was drawing rhythm itself, the machine-tooled precision of a Paris chorus line, and he did it with three colors and a handful of diagonal stripes.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 15, Madrid, 1927 (Rivadeneyra)
- Premiered: Teatro Apolo, Madrid, November 16, 1927
- Libretto: Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw
- Music: Jacinto Guerrero
- Cover art: Antonio Barbero Núñez
- Style: Spanish Art Deco illustration; vintage Spanish theatre poster art
A Zarzuela Trip to Paris
Las Alondras is a comedieta lírica, a light lyric comedy in two acts, by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw, the most successful libretto team in Spanish theatre, whose later Luisa Fernanda and Doña Francisquita are still performed today. The music is by Jacinto Guerrero, and the work premiered at Madrid's Teatro Apolo on November 16, 1927. The setting is Paris, around a world of midinettes, the young seamstresses and shopgirls who were the city's folk heroines, along with students, cabaret stages, and a dance craze atmosphere that the production data preserves in passing: the original staging included numbers for the Charleston era dances of the moment. "Alondras" means larks, and the joke is built in. These are little singing birds who also happen to work for a living.
From the Collection
Las Alondras, La Farsa Cover Print, 1927
Cover of La Farsa nº 15 (1927): the Paris-set zarzuela by Romero, Fernández Shaw, and Guerrero, drawn by Antonio Barbero.
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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
Antonio Barbero, Illustrator and Film Critic
The cover is signed Barbero at the lower left, and unlike many of La Farsa's artists, he is easy to follow. Antonio Barbero Núñez (1889 to 1962), born in Guadalajara, became one of the busiest graphic men in Madrid. He drew for ABC and Blanco y Negro, designed film posters for the Sagarra cinema circuit, produced nearly all the covers for the novel series La Novela Mundial, and in 1928 founded La Pantalla, a cinema weekly that made him one of Spain's first film critics. A collector who owns the complete La Farsa run names Barbero among the handful of illustrators who carried the collection's first period. His interior drawings turn up across the early issues as well.
Paris, by Way of Madrid
The Paris of Las Alondras is not the real city. It is the Paris that existed in the Madrid imagination, a capital of light, fashion, and mild scandal that Spanish audiences consumed the way they consumed French perfume and French operetta, eagerly and from a slight distance. The midinettes at the center of the piece, young women who worked in the Paris fashion trade and took their name from their lunch hour, the midi, were stock figures of that fantasy: independent, quick witted, and modern in a way that let a Madrid audience enjoy modernity at a safe remove. Romero and Fernández Shaw, masters of giving the public exactly the world it wanted, dressed the fantasy in Spanish rhythms and sent it home humming.
Guerrero's score kept one ear on the dance floor. The production records for the premiere list specialty numbers built around the dances of the hour, including a number called El Plátano, a Black Bottom, and a Tango infernal performed by an artist billed as La Yankee. Within a few years of the Charleston's arrival in Europe, a zarzuela at the respectable Teatro Apolo was staging the same dances that moralists were denouncing in the press, which tells you most of what you need to know about popular theatre's survival instincts. Barbero's chorus line belongs to that same moment. The precision kick line had become the international symbol of the modern revue, from the Tiller Girls to the Folies Bergère, and his cover translates it into flat Spanish deco without a single wasted line.
Reading the Cover
Barbero builds the image like a piece of music in repeat. The dancers are cropped at both edges, so the line clearly continues beyond the page, a stage too wide for the booklet. Diagonal black bars behind them work as both spotlight beams and bar lines. The palette is severely limited, red, black, and a grey green, and the dresses are drawn as single red gestures, triangles of color that make the legs, in pale stocking tones, do all the dancing. Spanish Art Deco is often described as a local accent on a French style, and here the accent is the economy: maximum movement from minimum means. It is worth comparing this cover with the La Aventurera cover from the same first months of the collection, where Roberto takes the opposite approach, two large figures and a stage of empty black.
Three Inks and a Deadline
Count the colors on Barbero's chorus line and you have counted the budget of a La Farsa cover: red, black, and a grey green, on the yellowish paper the booklet was printed on, which itself becomes a fourth tone wherever it shows through. This was not poverty disguised as style, or not only that. Spanish commercial printing of the 1920s was highly skilled at squeezing maximum effect from minimum means, because the economics of weekly publishing demanded it. Each additional color meant an additional plate or stone, an additional pass through the press, additional chances for the registration to wander, and additional cost on an object that sold for 50 céntimos and had to be ready days after the premiere it advertised.
The workflow behind the cover ran on rails. The illustrator delivered a gouache original. The shop separated it by hand into its component colors, redrew or photographed each onto its own printing surface, and printed the sheets in sequence, dark inks generally last so the drawing could lock the image together. Text was set separately and printed with the black pass. Where the registration is slightly off on a surviving copy, and collectors learn to love the small fringes of misaligned color, you are seeing the speed of that system in action. Barbero clearly designed with the press in mind: his dancers are single silhouettes with almost no interior detail, shapes that survive imperfect registration beautifully. The limited palette is the reason the image still looks modern. It was modern in the only way that mattered at a kiosk in 1927, fast, cheap, and impossible to ignore.
From the Apolo to a Madrid Bookstall
The Teatro Apolo, where Las Alondras premiered, was known as the cathedral of the género chico, Madrid's beloved short comic theatre, and stood on the Calle de Alcalá until its demolition in 1929, only two years after this premiere. The booklet outlived the theatre. Our copy of issue 15 came from the outdoor book market in Madrid where the founding group of La Farsa librettos turned up together, a rare surviving cluster of a publication that was designed to be disposable. The print is part of our Spanish Art Deco collection. The Fundación Guerrero maintains the production record for the premiere, including the full original cast, in its Las Alondras archive page.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
