Calle de Oudrid
Recalls Cristóbal Oudrid, a nineteenth-century composer from Badajoz who cultivated zarzuela in its golden age and wrote the famous march “El sitio de Zaragoza.”
Cristóbal Oudrid was born in Badajoz in 1825 and reached Madrid in 1844 to make a name for himself in the theaters. Pianist, conductor and composer, he ended up leading the orchestras of the Teatro Real and the Teatro de la Zarzuela, and belongs to the generation that revived Spanish zarzuela alongside Barbieri, Gaztambide and Inzenga.
His best-remembered piece was almost a commission and ended up flying on its own: the incidental music for a drama about Zaragoza’s resistance to the French. That march, “El sitio de Zaragoza,” broke free of the play to become an orchestral page famous in its own right, long after the drama was forgotten. The street lies far from the theaters where he triumphed, in Bellas Vistas, where his foreign surname rests among more traditional streets.