Calle Azcona
The street takes its name from Agustín Azcona, an actor, playwright and essayist. Between 1846 and 1847 he created the zarzuela-parody, a subgenre that adapted Italian operas by Donizetti and Bellini into the colloquial idiom of the género chico.
Calle de Agustín Azcona, an actor, playwright and essayist who enlivened Madrid’s theaters through the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1846 and 1847 he premiered at the Teatro de la Cruz three zarzuela-parodies that turned the fashionable Italian opera upside down. Behind jokey titles like El sacristán de San Lorenzo hid very serious operas by Donizetti and Bellini, which Azcona rewrote in a folk-comic key, with the colloquial speech of the Madrid of his day.
Scholars see in these works the direct seed of the splendor Spanish zarzuela would reach from 1851 on. Azcona also wrote away from the stage: in 1843 he undertook an ambitious History of Madrid that he left unfinished as blindness gradually took his sight. Even the year of his death is unclear: some place it in 1855 and others in 1860.
The street runs through the Guindalera neighborhood, in the Salamanca district, though the exact date it received this name could not be found.
Sources (5)
- Agustín Azcona — Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
- Agustín Azcona (¿–1860). El ingenioso creador de la zarzuela-parodia en la España del siglo XIX — MCN Biografías
- Las zarzuelas parodia de Agustín Azcona: una parodia literario-musical en el origen de la zarzuela española decimonónica — Dialnet
- Obras de Azcona, Agustín (m. 1855) — Cervantes Virtual, portal La parodia teatral en España
- Calle de Azcona — Callejero de Guindalera, Callejero.net