Los Claveles: Alonso's Cover for José Serrano's 1929 La Farsa Sainete
Los Claveles is a sainete in one act by Luis Fernández de Sevilla and Anselmo C. Carreño, with music by José Serrano, premiered at Madrid's Teatro Fontalba on April 6, 1929, and published as number 85 of La Farsa. Its cover, signed “Alonso” along its left edge, shows a majo in a red cape standing between the collection's vertical title banners. As the latest cover in the set, it shows where Spanish Art Deco poster design had arrived by the end of the decade.
The last of our seven covers breaks the pattern of the other six. There is no illustrated scene at all. A single figure, a majo in a red cape, yellow boots, and a plumed hat, stands between two vertical banners that spell LA FARSA in stacked deco letters, like a saint between the doors of an altarpiece. It is a heraldic cover, and it belongs to Los Claveles, the latest work in the set, a sainete that opened in the spring of 1929, near the end of the classic zarzuela age.
At a glance
- Published: La Farsa nº 85, Madrid, 1929 (Rivadeneyra)
- Premiered: Teatro Fontalba, Madrid, April 6, 1929
- Libretto: Luis Fernández de Sevilla and Anselmo C. Carreño
- Music: José Serrano
- Cover art: signed “Alonso” (likely Félix Alonso)
- Style: Late Spanish Art Deco; vintage Spanish poster design
A Sainete at the Perfume Factory
Los Claveles, carnations, is a sainete in one act and three scenes, with a libretto by Luis Fernández de Sevilla and Anselmo C. Carreño and music by José Serrano, the composer of La canción del olvido and one of the founding masters of the modern zarzuela. It premiered at the Teatro Fontalba in Madrid on April 6, 1929, to great success, and La Farsa published it the same year as issue number 85. The sainete was Madrid's own miniature genre, a short comic slice of working class city life, and Los Claveles sets it in a perfume factory that gives the work its name, where Rosa, a beautiful and self assured factory girl, keeps her admirers, including the cashier Fernando, at an expert distance. The majo on the cover, the traditional Madrid dandy in cape and cocked hat, is the sainete's ancestral mascot, a figure out of Goya's city, standing guard over a story that was, in 1929, entirely contemporary.
From the Collection
Vintage Spanish Art Deco Prints
Los Claveles is not yet offered as a print of its own. The other La Farsa covers and the Spanish Art Deco designs they inspired are in the collection.
Prints from $34.50 · Free shipping
VIEW THE COLLECTIONPrint Details
- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″, 20″ × 30″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
- Printed on demand; allow 5 to 12 business days for delivery
Keep Reading
La Aventurera: Roberto's Marionette Cover for the 1927 La Farsa Zarzuela
Signed Alonso, at the Edge
The cover's signature is easy to miss. It runs vertically in small script at the lower left edge of the artwork, half covered by the framing band, and appears to read Alonso, most plausibly the illustrator Félix Alonso, whose covers for these Madrid theatre collections are praised by the specialist Juan Ballester. A period bibliography credits the edition's interior drawings to another of the collection's regulars, Almada, which was a common division of labor: one artist for the cover, another for the inside pages. The design itself is a lesson in branding. By issue 85, La Farsa no longer needed to explain itself, so the masthead could become the architecture of the cover, and the single figure could be reduced to a bold emblem, cape, sash, boots, and plume, drawn in the same flat deco shapes as Roberto's La Aventurera couple two years earlier.
The Sainete: Madrid in Miniature
The sainete began as an intermission snack. In the 18th century, Ramón de la Cruz wrote short comic sketches of Madrid street life to be played between the acts of longer works, and discovered that the audience preferred the snack to the meal. A century later the form became an industry. Under the system called teatro por horas, theatres sold their evenings in one hour sessions, and short pieces, sainetes and short zarzuelas of the género chico, were produced by the hundred to fill them. The Teatro Apolo's late session, the famous cuarta de Apolo, was a Madrid institution, part theatre, part social ritual. Carlos Arniches, the great sainete writer of the early 20th century, sharpened the form into something that could hold real feeling inside its jokes, and every writer of Madrid miniatures after him, including Fernández de Sevilla and Carreño, worked in his long shadow.
Los Claveles is a late, lush flowering of the tradition, a sainete that behaves like a full zarzuela because its composer, José Serrano, had spent thirty years writing nothing smaller than hits. Its setting does quiet historical work too. The perfume factory girls of 1929 descend from the cigarreras, the women of Madrid's tobacco factory, who had been stock figures of the sainete and symbols of working women's independence since the previous century. Rosa, who manages her admirers like a forewoman managing a production line, is their granddaughter. When the sainete finally faded, it was not because audiences stopped loving Madrid in miniature. It was because the cinema learned to sell the same miniature faster, and because the world that had produced the cuarta de Apolo ended, abruptly, in 1936.
1929: The Era Nears Its End
Context gives this cheerful cover a certain poignancy. The world of Los Claveles, of weekly librettos, género chico theatres, and star composers, had less than a decade to run. Spain became a republic in 1931, and the Civil War that began in 1936 closed the theatres, scattered the companies, and ended La Farsa itself at issue 463 that August. José Serrano's sainete, one of his final works, belongs to the last confident spring of that culture, and its huge success suggests nobody in the Fontalba that night suspected a thing. The cover survives as the era's own self portrait: traditional, theatrical, and thoroughly modern in its design.
The Cover as a Miniature Poster
By 1929, the Spanish poster had a half century of glory behind it, from the great lithographed carteles of the 1890s through the modernismo of Penagos and Bartolozzi, and the La Farsa covers were that tradition's pocket descendants. They faced the poster's problem in miniature: stop a moving stranger, deliver a title, a mood, and a reason to buy, in under two seconds, at a distance of several paces. The solutions are the same at both scales. One figure, enlarged beyond life size relative to the frame. A silhouette that reads before its details do. Color used as signal rather than description. And lettering that behaves like architecture, which this cover makes literal by standing its majo between two columns of stacked type.
The printing was the poster's printing, too, scaled down: flat lithographed color, a separate pass for each ink, the black pass carrying the drawing and the text together. What the small format changed was the audience's distance. A poster is read across a street; a booklet cover is read across a kiosk counter and then again, privately, in the hand, where small pleasures like the plume's red flourish or the sash's pattern can reward a second look. Alonso, or whoever signed this cover at its edge, gives the design both distances at once: a heraldic emblem from six feet away, a portrait from six inches. That double address is the whole art of the theatre booklet, and it is why these covers enlarge to poster size without embarrassment. They were posters all along, traveling incognito.
Completing the Set
Los Claveles closes the group of seven La Farsa booklets found together at the outdoor book market in Madrid, the rare set that became the first prints at Vintage Print Project and, in the end, the reason the shop exists at all. Read in sequence, from La Aventurera in 1927 to this sainete of 1929, the covers chart Spanish Art Deco finding its feet in real time, in the humblest of formats, the 50 céntimo booklet. The print is available in our Spanish Art Deco collection. Wikipedia maintains the work's premiere record and synopsis at its Los Claveles entry.
Part of our series on vintage Spanish Art Deco and the La Farsa covers, the seven booklets that started Vintage Print Project.
