Sebastián Durón is usually recognized as one of the leading Spanish
composers of theater music, although this repertoire is barely performed
nowadays, even in concert version. As far as we know, ten complete
scores of Durón’s stage works have been preserved, four of which are
entirely sung, a number that is higher than that found in theater music
by other important Spanish musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries,
such as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas or Antonio Literes. The fact that,
in his theater music, Durón uses both the conventions of 17th-century
Spanish court theater and some elements of the dramma per musica has
placed these pieces in a diffuse and poorly understood territory, unlike
what happens with the works of Hidalgo and Literes, repertoire which
has been studied better. For some scholars, the theater music of Durón
is incoherent due to the introduction of elements that are unfamiliar to
the Spanish court theater, in contrast to the great dramaturgy devised
by Calderón de la Barca and Hidalgo. On the contrary, for other
scholars, the music of Durón is remarkable for its openness to
modernity, although it is a timid modernization against the determined
Italianization that is observed in Literes and other later musicians. In
our opinion, however, Durón’s theater work exhibits great originality
and drama in itself, which is hardly understandable if we approach it
with the abstract models that face tradition to modernity, or Spanish to
Italian.
