José Serrano

La canción del olvido in 1916 and La dolorosa in 1930 are the two Serrano scores that never left the Spanish stage. He was born in Sueca, near Valencia, on 14 October 1873; his father directed the town band and taught him first, and he was reading music at five and playing guitar and violin by twelve. He studied with Salvador Giner at the Valencia Conservatory from 1889 and moved to Madrid in 1892 on a ministry scholarship. More than fifty zarzuelas followed, most of them one-act pieces in the género chico, built on strong dramatic situations and long-breathed melody with an audible debt to Puccini and Italian verismo: Moros y cristianos (1905), Alma de Dios (1907), Los claveles (1929). He also wrote the hymn for the 1909 Valencian Regional Exhibition, adopted in 1925 as the anthem of the Valencian Community. He died in Madrid on 8 March 1941. He worked alongside Manuel Fernandez Caballero in Madrid, and his first real success came with El motete in 1900; La reina mora belongs to the same catalogue.