Antonio García Gutiérrez

Antonio García Gutiérrez.

Antonio García Gutiérrez (4 October 1813, Chiclana de la Frontera, Cádiz—26 August 1884, Madrid) was a Spanish Romantic dramatist.

After having studied medicine in his native town, he moved to Madrid in 1833 and earned a meager living by translating plays of Eugène Scribe and Alexandre Dumas, père. Lacking success, he was on the point of enlisting when he suddenly sprang into fame as the author of a play called El trovador (The Troubadour), which was played for the first time on 1 March 1836. This placed him among the leaders of the Romantic movement in Spain and became known all over Europe through Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il trovatore. His next great success was Simón Bocanegra, in 1843. Again this was made into an opera by Verdi, as Simon Boccanegra.

But his plays were not lucrative and García Gutiérrez emigrated to Spanish America, working as a journalist in Cuba and Mexico until 1850, when he returned to Spain.

The best works of his later period are a zarzuela titled El grumete (1853), La venganza catalana (1864) and Juan Lorenzo (1865). García Gutiérrez became head of the archaeological museum at Madrid, the city where he died. His Poesías (1840) and another volume of lyrics, Luz y tinieblas (1842), are comparatively minor; but the versification of his plays, and his power of analysing feminine emotions, give him a foremost place among the Spanish dramatists of the 19th century.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

• Gutiérrez, Antonio Garcia, El trovador on gutenberg.org (in Spanish). Introduction by H., H. Vaughan (1907) in English
• Webber, Christopher, "Antonio Garcia Gutiérrez" on Zarzuela.net. The biography page focusses on his zarzuela libretti
• Works by Antonio García Gutiérrez at Project Gutenberg