Doña Francisquita

Doña Francisquita is a zarzuela in three acts composed by Amadeo Vives to a Spanish libretto by Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández Shaw and based on Lope de Vega's play La discreta enamorada (The Ingenious Lover). With its colourful score and comic story of multiple love triangles which ends happily for the young lovers, Francisquita and Fernando, Doña Francisquita is considered a classic of the zarzuela genre, and Vives' masterpiece.

Doña Francisquita premiered at the Teatro Apolo in Madrid on 17 October 1923. It became very popular, receiving over 5000 performances throughout the Spanish-speaking world in the years immediately following its premiere. The work is still regularly performed in Spain and Latin America, but like most works in this genre, has only rarely been seen elsewhere. It was, however, performed in French translation at Monte Carlo, Brussels and Vichy in 1934 and received a major production at Washington National Opera in 1998.

There have been several film adaptations of Doña Francisquita, the most recent of which was directed by Ladislao Vajda and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953 with Mirtha Legrand and Armando Calvo in the leading roles. The Act 1 soprano aria "Canción del ruiseñor" ("The Song of the Nightingale") and the Act 2 tenor aria "Por el humo se sabe donde está el fuego" ("We know where the fire is by the smoke") have been individually recorded or sung in recitals by many opera singers from Spanish-speaking countries.

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Wikipedia