Federico Chueca, Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897)

Not gonna lie: I made a bit of a miscalculation with this one. I wasn't sure whether I should write anything about it at all, but what the hell. My experience might be of interest. Or not! But it's my blog! None can stop me!

So this is a zarzuela, which would be a good scrabble word, although you'd have to use a blank for one of the z's. I came upon this production, which doesn't have English subtitles BUT does include Spanish closed captioning. So I thought, okay, fine, I've done this many times before in situations like this: I'll just auto-translate them, and sure, they'll be a bit mangled in places, but still perfectly followable. This turned out...not to be the case. I think it's because the closed captioning is "auto-generated" (not sure how that works in practice), meaning it's probably already in pretty bad Spanish, but when it was further rendered into English, most of it was just utter gibberish. Plus, most of the music wasn't closed captioned at all. So...not ideal.

The title means "water, sugar, and brandy," which was apparently a popular cry of nineteenth-century Spanish street vendors.  I know that the story involves a young woman, Asia, with literary ambitions. She has a boyfriend but no money, and her mother wants her to marry a rich guy. And...other stuff happens. Honestly, there's a detailed plot summary here, but I just read it and think, huh. That...happened? Did it? If you say so. So let's concede that I did not watch this under ideal conditions.

But what about the MUSIC? That's the important thing, no? Well...that's open to debate. Because the thing is, there ain't much of it. This is a seventy-ish-minute thing, and the actual music part is...maybe twenty minutes? And also, the finale takes up a good ten minutes of that, so it feels very unbalanced, and music is not common. And what music there was didn't do much for me. There were parts where I thought, okay, this could get good, but then it would just be over, and I'd think, huh. That amounted to...very little.

I mean, the production is bright and pretty, for sure. But I didn't like it, and I think that's only partially because I didn't understand it. Is this opera? Well...I guess it has to be operetta, at any rate. There's no rule about how much music it has to contain to "count." But I don't know if I should even include it on my big ol' list of Watched Operas. There's no DVD or anywhere, as far as I know, to watch it with proper English subs, but I will, in scrupulous fairness, find another zarzuela to see that I CAN see properly before I cast my Terrible Judgment on the whole genre.