Discussions of flamenco’s Golden Age frequently emphasise the codification of palos and the emergence of the commercial café cantante. Understandably so: this is a time when flamenco “coheres” we might say. But the fact that the transition from private spaces to public venues professionalised the performers and coincided with a profound ideological realignment is not the only story to tell here. During this period, emerging critical frameworks began to tether the aesthetic qualities of the music to a specifically ethnic identity, the gitano, (the Andalusian Roms population). Authenticity was no longer solely a matter of geographic origin or socio-economic class; it was fundamentally reconstructed as a matter of blood and lineage (both by flamenco’s detractors and by its defenders). The performance of suffering so central to the flamenco aesthetic became codified as an exclusive (and marginal) ethnic inheritance, a kind of traumatic ethnogenesis, as Timothy Mitchell has called it.
This ideological realignment was heavily propelled by a wider nineteenth-century movement among folklorists (costumbristas) and early “scholars” who sought to categorise a rapidly expanding musical landscape. Rooted in amateur positivism and driven by an anxiety that modernity would extinguish traditional vernacular cultures, these intellectuals attempted to archive what they believed was a vanishing world. In doing so, they established a rigid and highly consequential binary that delineated between the cante gitano, positioned as the pure, ancient, and uncorrupted expression of the Gitanos (Iberian Rom) and the cante andaluz or flamenco, viewed as a diluted, hybridised form performed for the general public. This theoretical bifurcation mapped artistic value directly onto racial categories, cementing the notion that true, “deep” (jondo) flamenco was an exclusive biological inheritance. The intellectual discourse effectively constructed the Gitano performer as the sole legitimate custodian of the emotional core of the music.
It is crucial to untangle this intellectual paradigm from the simultaneous commercialisation of the café cantante. They were parallel developments that frequently collided and complicated one another, rather than operating as a simple mechanism of cause and effect. The bustling venues catered primarily to a bourgeois clientele who consumed flamenco according to the prevailing nineteenth-century paradigms of Romanticism (and internal Orientalism). The paying audience sought the exotic, the primitive, and the passionate Other, desiring a visceral encounter with an imagined Andalusian subculture. Gitano performers operating within these venues navigated a space where their ethnic identity was heavily scrutinised and valued by the market. The racialised expectations of the audience interacted dynamically with the performative strategies on stage. Artists negotiated their gitanidad within a commercial framework that amplified racial identity, producing a highly complex dynamic between the performer, the intellectual discourse of the folklorists, and the paying consumer.
The complexities of this environment are sharply illustrated by the career of Silverio Franconetti. A non-Gitano singer and entrepreneur, Franconetti is widely credited with bringing the most hermetic Gitano song forms into the public domain. His opening of a prominent café cantante in Seville in 1881 was instrumental in popularising the art form and professionalising the artists. Yet, his position was inherently paradoxical within the concurrent racialised discourse of the era. While he championed the deep repertoire and demonstrated immense vocal mastery, the emerging purist ideology dictated a rigid boundary. Lacking Romani heritage, his performance was deemed incapable of attaining the ontological authenticity of his Romani peers. The intellectual frameworks of the period ensured that non-Romani artists, regardless of their technical brilliance, historical knowledge, or dedication to the repertoire, were perpetually positioned as imitators rather than originators.
The ideological project also extended deeply into the classification of the repertoire itself. Specific palos were aggressively demarcated along ethnic lines. Forms such as the soleá and the seguiriya were canonised as the exclusive domain of the Romani lineage, presented as primal expressions of historical trauma and marginalisation. Conversely, forms deriving from regional folklore, such as the fandango or the cantiñas of the Bay of Cádiz, were subjected to a process of aflamencamiento. This process involved adopting the rhythmic and harmonic aesthetics of the Romani core to make Andalusian folk songs palatable to the café cantante audience. However, even as these forms were integrated into the flamenco repertoire, the racial hierarchy remained strictly intact. The aflamencado styles were frequently categorised as lighter or less profound. This categorisation reinforced the ideology that true depth was exclusively synonymous with Romani bloodlines, systematically ignoring the immense technical skill required to perform these hybrid forms. The structural categorisation of the music served to constantly replicate the racial binary.
The legacy of flamenco’s Golden Age is therefore not merely a catalogue of codified song forms or the architectural memory of the cafés cantantes. Its most enduring and problematic inheritance is the deeply entrenched racial ideology surrounding the art form. The intellectual frameworks constructed in the late nineteenth century established a paradigm of pureza that continues to dominate contemporary flamenco discourse, shaping festival programming and critical reception alike. By transforming a fluid, geographically situated cultural practice into a rigid, racially defined essence, the commentators of this era created a mythology that performers and scholars still navigate today. Analysing this period requires acknowledging that the expansion of flamenco involved a complex intersection of folkloric preservation, Orientalism, and identity construction that permanently altered the trajectory of the art form.
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