The cuplé was a popular risqué Spanish theatre song style in the late years of the 19th century. From 1893–1911 the songs were a feature of the "género ínfimo" (lowest type)

cabaret Cabaret is a form of theatrical entertainment featuring music, song, dance, recitation, or drama. The performance venue might be a pub, a casino, a hotel, a restaurant, or a nightclub with a stage for performances. The audience, often dining or d ...

theatre sung by solo female singers, or men in drag, and attended mainly by men. But in the second decade of the 20th century the cuplé, in a more respectable form, became more family-friendly and was associated with the makings of stars of the Spanish theatre such as Aurora Jauffret, "La Goya".Bradley S. Epps, Despina Kakoudaki ''All about Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema'' 2009 "Even the cuplé, the song with which Montiel becomes identified, derives from a tradition of risqué musical numbers filled with sexual innuendo performed by women." The term comes from French ''couplet'', but the poetic form

couplet A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal (closed) or run-on (open). In a formal (or closed) couplet, each of the ...

in Spanish is a ''pareado'' or ''dístico''. The cuplé prefigured the copla of the 1930s.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cuple Spanish music Cupletistas