El retablo de maese Pedro

El retablo de maese Pedro
Puppet-opera by Manuel de Falla
Don Quixote watching Master Peter's puppet show, an illustration by Gustave Doré from Don Quixote, chapter 26, the scene which inspired the work
Translation	Master Peter's Puppet Show
Language	Spanish
Based on	Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Premiere	25 June 1923 (1923-06-25) Salon of Edmond de Polignac, Paris

El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show) is a puppet-opera in one act with a prologue and epilogue, composed by Manuel de Falla to a Spanish libretto based on an episode from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. The libretto is an abbreviation of chapter 26 of the second part of Don Quixote, with some lines added from other parts of the work. Falla composed this opera "in devoted homage to the glory of Miguel de Cervantes" and dedicated it to the Princess de Polignac, who commissioned the work. Because of its brief length by operatic standards (about 27 minutes), its very challenging part for a boy opera performer (who has by far the most lines), and its use of puppets, it is not part of the standard operatic repertoire.

Otto Mayer-Serra has described this opera as a work where Falla reached beyond "Andalusianism" for his immediate musical influence and colour and began the transition into the "Hispanic neo-classicism" of his later works.

In 1919 Winnaretta Singer, aka la Princesse Edmond de Polignac, commissioned from Falla a piece that could be performed in her salon, using her own elaborate puppet theater. (Her other commissions included Igor Stravinsky's Renard and Erik Satie's Socrate, although neither of those works had its premiere in her private theater.) The work was completed in 1923. Falla decided to set an episode from Cervantes' Don Quixote that actually depicts a puppet play. Don Quixote watches a puppet show and gets so drawn into the action that he seeks to rescue the damsel in distress, only to destroy poor Master Peter's puppet theater in the process.

Falla's original plan for the Princess's theater was a two-tiered, play-within-a-play approach: large puppets representing Quixote, Master Peter, and the others in attendance, and small figures for Master Peter's puppets. The three singers would be with the orchestra in the pit, rather than onstage. After a concert performance in Seville on 23 March 1923, that is how it was performed with the Princess's puppets in the music room of her Paris estate on 25 June of that year, with Vladimir Golschmann conducting. Hector Dufranne sang Don Quijote (Quixote), Wanda Landowska played the harpsichord (Falla composed his 1926 Harpsichord Concerto for her in appreciation), and Ricardo Viñes and Emilio Pujol were among the artists and musicians serving as stagehands. Also at the premiere was Francis Poulenc, who met Landowska for the first time; she asked him to write a harpsichord concerto for her, and his Concert champêtre was the result.