Calle de Gaztambide

The name recalls Joaquín Gaztambide, born in Tudela in 1822 and dead in Madrid in 1870. A double-bass player, orchestra conductor, and theater impresario, he was one of the figures who built Romantic zarzuela when the genre was seeking a theater of its own and a loyal audience. He premiered works that filled halls for years, among them El juramento (1858), the only one still in the repertoire. Alongside Barbieri and others he drove the Teatro de la Zarzuela, opened in 1856, of which he was a partner and director, and later founded with Barbieri the Sociedad de Conciertos de Madrid, the seed of the city’s symphonic life. Barbieri, his friend and rival, called him “the best of us.” The street was opened in the Chamberí district at the end of the nineteenth century, and the neighborhood around it later took its surname.