of various topics such as royalty, the Army, and politics. They do so with pleasant, catchy music with a certain popular, erotic tone. Comic operas of this sort were nevertheless quickly eclipsed by the expansion of the género chico and became less popular after the mid-1870s. Because of the need for short operetta-like works that could fit into one hour, the first performances were of old plays that were already popular, such as El Maestro de baile ("The Dancing Master", by Luis Misón, and predating the género chico by many years), or plays like Una vieja ("An Old Woman", Joaquín Gaztambide) and El grumete ("The Cabin Boy", Emilio Arrieta). These plays had originally been considered secondary and were programmed as such, beside larger, more important zarzuelas, but with a change of taste and the tendency towards nationalism and German opera, the Italian taste copied by the zarzuelas would fall out of fashion, whilst the character of these little plays shone for itself. With time, new short plays were written for this short format and jolly style, notably influenced by the comic genre (with suggestive titles such as La hoja de parra ("The Fig Leaf") or Dice el sexto mandamiento ("According to the Sixth Commandment"). It is easy to see that the goal of género chico is purely to entertain the audience. Unlike the serious, dramatic themes and complicated plots in zarzuela mayor, this genre presented simplified farces about everyday topics such as daily life in Madrid. This is why it was so successful with the public: apart from the low price, people could easily follow the plot and identify with the characters. Development The decade of the 1870s saw the genre consolidate itself, with numerous authors publishing, for example Miguel Nieto and his El Gorro Frigio ("The Phrygian Cap"), and Fernández Caballero's Château Margaux. The genre was now centred on a model similar to that of contemporary realist literature, mainly with the musical form of lyrical one-act farces. The definitive accolade that the género chico would receive was with Chueca and Valverde's La Gran Vía, in the summer of 1886. The play, named after a major street that was then under construction through the heart of Madrid, was so successful that it went from the summer theatres to the Apolo, and was repeated several times. It incorporated a series of lively, unrelated one-act farces on current affairs. Federico Chueca was