page_title: Cuban music
section_title: Musical theatre
hierarchical_section_title: Cuban music / Popular music / Musical theatre
caption_attribution_description: English: photograph of Rita Montaner taken during the shooting of film El romance del plamar; she in costume.
context_page_description: Cuban music comes from the Caribbean island of Cuba. Cuba has developed a wide range of musical styles, which draw on its cultural origins in Europe and Africa. Cuba's music has been hugely popular and influential throughout the world. It has been perhaps the most popular form of world music since the introduction of recording technology.
  The music of Cuba, including the instruments and the dances, is mostly of European and African origin. Most forms of the present day are fusions and mixtures of these two great sources. The original inhabitants of Cuba died out, and little remains of their traditions.
context_section_description: From the 18th century to modern times, popular theatrical formats used, and gave rise to, music and dance. In addition to staging some European operas and operettas, Cuban composers gradually developed ideas which better suited their creole audience. Recorded music was the way for Cuban music to reach the world. The most recorded artist in Cuba up to 1925 was a singer at the Alhambra, Adolfo Colombo. Records show he recorded about 350 numbers between 1906 and 1917, of which very few survive today.
  The first theatre in Havana opened in 1776. The first Cuban-composed opera appeared in 1807. Musical theater was hugely important in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Radio, which began in Cuba in 1922, helped the growth of popular music because it provided publicity and a new source of income for the artists.
  Zarzuela is a small-scale light operetta format. Starting off with imported Spanish content, it developed into a running commentary on Cuba's social and political events and problems. A string of front-rank composers, such as Ernesto Lecuona, produced a series of hits for the theatres in Havana. Great stars like the vedette Rita Montaner, who could sing, play the piano, dance and act, were the Cuban equivalents of Mistinguett and Josephine Baker in Paris.
caption: Rita Montaner in 1938
  
  during shooting of El romance del palmar
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