Calle Ricardo de la Vega

Calle Ricardo de la Vega holds the name of the man who wrote one of Madrid’s most sung texts. La verbena de la Paloma came from his pen, and almost everyone has at some point hummed that line “where are you going with a Manila shawl?” without knowing who put the words there. He was born in Madrid on 7 February 1839 and died in the same city in 1910. It ran in the family: his father was the playwright Ventura de la Vega and his mother the singer Manuela Oreiro. He combined writing sainetes with a job at the Ministry of Public Works. His greatest work was La verbena de la Paloma, a one-act lyric sainete with music by Tomás Bretón, premiered at the Teatro Apolo on 17 February 1894. And here is the anecdote: Bretón received the libretto in early January, with rehearsals already under way, and delivered the complete score in barely nineteen days. Madrid did not forget him. In 1918 the city unveiled a plaque on the house where he died, and his bust figures in the monument to the sainete writers at the Glorieta de San Vicente.