Federico Moreno Torroba's Luisa Fernanda premiered at Madrid's Teatro Calderón on March 26, 1932, and it is considered the final great flowering of Spain's beloved zarzuela tradition before the form began to fade from the popular stage. Torroba drew on the legacy of zarzuela grande and the lighter género chico that preceded him. Luisa Fernanda has an emotional range and scale that none of its models quite achieved. Musically, the work is a showcase of casticismo in which Torroba's deliberately cultivates a spirit of pure, popular Spanish nationalism. The result is a score full of vivid Spanish color, laced with the grace of Viennese operetta and the emotional heat of Italian verismo.
The opera unfolds against the real political turmoil of 1868 Spain, as the regime of Queen Isabel II teeters under pressure from a rising republican movement. At the center of it all is Luisa Fernanda, the innkeeper's lodger, whose fiancé Javier has grown distant and ambitious, far more interested in his own rising star than in her. When the wealthy landowner Vidal Hernando arrives in Madrid looking for a wife, Luisa flirts with him but warns him plainly: her heart belongs to someone else. Javier, meanwhile, falls under the spell of the seductive monarchist Duchess Carolina, abandoning both his republican sympathies and Luisa at the same moment. Hurt and humiliated, Luisa turns to Vidal, who instantly declares himself a revolutionary for her sake and proposes on the spot.
What follows is a story where romance and revolution become impossible to separate. At a charity festival, Carolina tries to buy Vidal's political loyalty and fails; Luisa, stung by Javier's arrogance, publicly chooses Vidal over him. As the republican uprising gathers force, Vidal fights bravely in the streets, not out of political conviction, but purely for love of Luisa. Javier, fighting for the other side, is captured and nearly executed by the mob, saved only by Luisa's intervention. When the monarchist forces ultimately triumph in this battle, Javier walks off arm in arm with Carolina, and a wounded, victorious-in-love Vidal wins Luisa's promise of marriage.
Years later, with the revolution finally successful and the wedding to Vidal imminent, a broken Javier returns to beg Luisa for one final meeting. She admits she still loves him, but resolves to honor her word to Vidal. It is Vidal himself, watching her anguish, who makes the opera's most generous and devastating choice: he releases her from her promise, encourages her to go to Javier, and is left alone on his estate with nothing but the memory of the woman he loved and lost. Luisa Fernanda endures as one of the most beloved works in the Spanish music theater tradition.
