Calle de Tomás Bretón

Tomás Bretón was born in Salamanca in 1850, into a poor family, and lost his father as a small child. He began studying music early to help at home, playing in cafés and theaters, until he reached the Conservatory and became a composer and orchestra conductor. Much of his career he devoted to one idea: that Spain should have an opera of its own, with a national voice and national themes. From that conviction came Los amantes de Teruel and La Dolores, the works he loved most. Bretón, who saw himself as an author of serious operas, lives on in memory through a piece he thought almost minor: La verbena de la Paloma, premiered at the Teatro Apolo in February 1894. In little more than an hour it portrayed the Madrid of the lower quarters on an August night, with its shawl, its barrel organ, and its jealousy, and it endures as one of the most performed zarzuelas of all time. His name landed in Delicias, a working-class neighborhood of Arganzuela born around the station and the railway workshops.