In the seventeenth century, a mixture of sophisticated verse drama, allegorical opera, popular song, and dance, became the fashion of the Spanish court for over the next hundreds of years. This new lyric-dramatic genre of music was created in Spain by playwright/writer/poet Calderon De La Barca during Spanish Golden Age in 1657. Zarzuela, the new music theatrical genre, was capable of alternating spoken and sung scenes. People in Spain living in that era could finally enjoy a local dramatic representation of music in their own native language. Mary Quinn presented a lecturer to familiarize those in the twenty-first century with the new genre Zarzuela, she went into details of the work El Laurel de Apolo.
Calderon de la Barca created Zarzuela to celebrate the birth of the prince of Spain, in fact writing and composing music to royal families was a common practice in the Baroque era. Composers sometimes abdicated their own personal goals
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This ambiguous definition of metamorphosis would be much more clear if the use of spoken dialogue was combined with music, and not just alternating. Even though the alternation of spoken dialogue and music is very good to transmit a message, I do think it could be used together. In other words, there is a lack of arias and recitatives in El Laurel de Apolo. This lack of background sounds reinforcing the text makes the work piece vague and therefore it gives gaps to misinterpretations. As an example, is the painting shown by Mary Quinn of Apollo and Daphne. I do not know the real meaning of the painting; is Apollo chasing Daphne and not caring about her metamorphosis? Is he trying to save her? Is she trying to escape from him by becoming part of nature? I didn't understand the relationship between the painting and the Zarzuela genre