Ruperto Chapí

Ruperto Chapí
(b Villena, nr Alicante, 27 March 1851; d Madrid, 25 March 1909). Spanish composer. In 1865 he conducted the band in his home village, where his father, an enthusiastic music-lover, was a barber.

Two years later Chapí enrolled in the Madrid Conservatory, studying with Arrieta and winning first prize in harmony in 1869. While earning a precarious living as cornettist in the Circo de Price theatre orchestra, he composed an overture Zanzé and his first zarzuela Abel y Caín. In 1871 he competed successfully for the directorship of the artillery regimental band. His first symphonic suite La corte de Granada: fantasía morisca was composed in 1873 (the third of its four movements, ‘Serenata’, is still played); his one-act opera Las naves de Cortés, performed at the Teatro Real on 19 April 1874 with Tamberlik in the title role, earned him a three-year government grant to study, first at the Spanish Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, then at Milan and Paris. As fruit of these years abroad, he sent back the one-act operas La hija de Jefté (1876) and La muerte de Garcilaso (1878), and the three-act Roger de Flor (1878).

Beginning with his one-act Música clásica (1880), Chapí, once more in Madrid, wrote more than 100 zarzuelas, many of which ran more than 100 consecutive nights. In contrast with Chueca, who caught the ear of the illiterate, Chapí's zarzuelas appealed to the city's middle and upper classes. In 1905 he published the first of four string quartets, a unique venture for a zarzuela composer and one symptomatic of his loftier musical aims.