El Cóndor Pasa (play)

El cóndor pasa
Zarzuela by Daniel Alomía Robles
The Andean condor, a symbol of freedom from which the zarzuela takes its name
Librettist	Julio Baudouin
Premiere	19 December 1913 (1913-12-19) Teatro Mazzi, Lima

El cóndor pasa is a Peruvian zarzuela (musical play) whose music was composed by Peruvian songwriter Daniel Alomía Robles in 1913 with a script written by Julio de La Paz (pseudonym of the Limenian dramatist Julio Baudouin). The piano arrangement of this play's most famous melody, El cóndor pasa, was legally registered on May 3, 1933, by The Edward B. Marks Music Corporation with the United States' Library of Congress under the number 9643. This zarzuela is written in prose and consists of one musical play and two acts. The eponymous piece, performed during the zarzuela's parade scene, has no lyrics. In July 2013, the Colectivo Cultural Centenario El Cóndor Pasa (cultural association) re-edited the original script, which had been lost for some time, as a CD containing the dialogues and seven musical pieces. The music from the original score was reconstructed by musicologist Luis Salazar Mejía, with the collaboration of musicians Daniel Dorival and Claude Ferrier, and it was performed on November 14, 15 and 16, 2013, at the Teatro UNI in Lima to commemorate the masterpiece's first centenary. All of the work done to recover and re-release the zarzuela (including the CD) was possible thanks to the efforts of musicologist Luis Salazar Mejía and cultural promoter Mario Cerrón Fetta (members of the above-mentioned cultural association), and was carried out without any public financial support.

The zarzuela's famous eponymous melody is considered the second national anthem of Peru. It is based on the traditional Andean music of Peru, which was declared an element of National Cultural Heritage in 2004. There are probably more than 400 versions of the piece by artists from around the world, at least 300 of which have lyrics.

The story takes place in the early twentieth century in Yápac, a mining settlement in the Peruvian Andes.

Act 1

The first scene begins with the Prelude. It is before dawn and Yápac's miners are heading to work. A male choir is performing a mournful song "En la nieve de las cumbres" ("On the Snow of the Peaks"). At the end of the song some miners fall behind while listening to the shepherd playing the quena (traditional flute of the Andes); they watch him disappear among the clouds that surround the peaks with admiration, and they envy his freedom. Frank is a young miner who does not accept the mine owners' abuse. "Something tells me that life isn't this way", Frank says, but the other miners accuse him of being ungrateful to the patrones.