Antonio García Gutiérrez

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Antonio García Gutiérrez (July 5, 1812, Chiclana de la Frontera, Cádiz—August 6, 1884, Madrid) was a Spanish Romantic dramatist.

After having studied medicine in his native town, he moved to Madrid in 1832, and earned a meager living by translating plays of Eugène Scribe and the Alexandre Dumas, père; lacking success, he was on the point of enlisting when he suddenly sprang into fame as the author of El Trovador ("The Troubadour"), which was played for the first time on March 1, 1836. García Gutiérrez never surpassed this first effort, which placed him among the leaders of the Romantic movement in Spain, and which became known all over Europe through Giuseppe Verdi's music (as the opera Il trovatore).

His next great success was Simon Bocanegra (1843; again an opera by Verdi, as Simon Boccanegra). However, since his plays were not lucrative, he 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).

He became head of the archaeological museum at Madrid, the city where he died. His Poesías (1840) and another volume of lyrics, entitled 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.