No puede ser (La tabernera del puerto)

Sorozábal's La tabernera del puerto reached the Teatro Tívoli in Barcelona on 6 April 1936, three months before the Spanish Civil War began. Federico Romero and Guillermo Fernández-Shaw wrote the libretto, setting a smuggling story in a northern port where a tavern keeper's supposed daughter proves to be something else. Sorozábal called it a romantic zarzuela in three acts and scored it with the weight of an opera; his Basque background shows in the choral writing for the fishermen. Written by a composer of declared republican sympathies, it kept its place on Spanish stages through the decades that followed.