Calle del Maestro Chapí

The “maestro” of the sign was Ruperto Chapí, a musician born in Villena in 1851, the son of a barber. He began studying solfège as a child, was conducting the local band while still a teenager, and at sixteen left for Madrid to enter the Conservatory, where Tomás Bretón was his classmate. Chapí wrote some of the zarzuelas Madrid still hums. La Revoltosa, premiered in 1897, portrays a traditional tenement courtyard with a prelude that still opens concerts; earlier had come El tambor de granaderos. His music coexisted with serious opera, but it was the short, popular theater that gave him a name on the street. His most lasting gesture did not sound on a stage. At odds with a publisher who controlled the rights to his works, in 1899 he brought together composers and librettists and founded the Society of Authors. He died in Madrid in 1909, a few days short of his fifty-eighth birthday, weeks after premiering his last opera.