New Sources of Music from Spain and Colonial Mexico at the Sutro Library

Abstract

The recent discovery of an anthology in manuscript of 124 late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Spanish theater songs imported to Mexico and three late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Mexican music manuscripts of theatrical, dance, and salon music enlarges and enhances our knowledge of the secular-music repertory performed in Mexico. The discovery of the anthology of Spanish theater music not only significantly expands the known repertory of baroque Spanish accompanied solo theatrical song but also points to the practice in colonial Mexico of importing and performing theatrical songs by such Madrid court and theater composers as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas, and Juan de Serqueira. The three Mexican manuscripts preserve many of the popular and classical instrumental music genres performed in the aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and upper- and middle-class salons and performance spaces, as well as in the public dance venues, academies, and theaters of the time. A wide range of music is represented: ballet music, performed at the Coliseo in Mexico City; arrangements of Italian opera overtures and arias; various kinds of European and Mexican dance music; and classic-period forms. These manuscripts also reflect an interest among Mexican musicians in earlier music styles and confirm that Mexicans knew and performed the music current in London, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, and elsewhere in Europe. I fortuitously discovered these manuscript collections when I visited the Sutro Library (part of the California State Library) in San Francisco, California, while in search of Mexican music imprints and publications relating to music in Mexico in the extensive Sutro Library collection of Mexican pamphlets. The Sutro Library houses more than eight thousand Mexican governmental and ecclesiastical imprints and other publications, which were inventoried as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project of the United States government in the 1930s. An extensive descriptive catalog was published by the WPA.(1) The Mexican imprints that relate to music are indeed of interest; however, the four manuscript collections described here are of special importance. The manuscript music at the Sutro Library has never before been studied, and only some of the several hundred other nonmusical Mexican manuscripts in the Sutro Library have been examined in depth by Mexican and North American scholars. The printed and manuscript Mexican materials now in the Sutro Library were purchased by the wealthy San Francisco book collector Adolph Sutro (1830-1898)(2) from the important Mexico City bookseller and publisher Francisco Abadiano and his son Eufemio in 1885 and 18897 Adolph Sutro, born in Alsace, arrived in San Francisco in 1850 at the height of the Gold Rush and established a lucrative career as a cigar importer. Great wealth came to him when he successfully planned and engineered the Sutro Tunnel to drain the Comstock Lode silver mine in Nevada, which at the time was flooded by water and generally inoperative. Influenced by social movements of the era, Sutro became a philanthropist: he built the Sutro Baths (a huge indoor swimming pool) and the famous Cliff House in San Francisco, created the Sutro Forest on San Francisco's highest hill, served as mayor from 1895 to 1896, and laid plans to establish a public library in the city. With the future library in mind, Sutro became a large-scale collector of manuscripts, rare books, and other materials, using the services of agents to buy entire collections in Europe and elsewhere. Before long, his collection included Hebrew, Egyptian, and medieval European manuscripts, and first editions of Shakespeare. To escape an understandably irate wife who had just found out about the mistress he had hidden away in Sutro, Nevada (the town he established near the entrance to the Sutro Tunnel, near Virginia City), Sutro traveled by train from San Francisco to Mexico City, where he encountered Francisco Abadiano's bookstore, one of the city's leading bookshops, which contained an eclectic array of manuscript and printed items. …