The year 1889 fell in one of Sousa's most productive periods; 1888 to 1890 saw the composition of this march, The Thunderer, The High School Cadets, The Washington Post, and Semper Fidelis. This was not one of his most profitable period, since he sold the rights to these and several other marches outright for thirty-five dollars each to publisher Harry Coleman, who became a very wealthy man off of them. Sousa would become wealthy off of later marches, after he learned his lesson concerning music publication economics.

There is no occasion known for his writing this charming and colorful march. Sousa had an Iberian heritage (his parents came from Portugal), and including instruments like castanets in the instrumentation of this march (which has a theatrical rather than a martial flavor) might have simply been a fillip prompted by his heritage.

At any rate, things Spanish were in at the time, and the march appeared under the title The Picador, in a sheet music edition with a stylized picture of a picador, the mounted pike-man who sticks the bull in the shoulder with a weapon that draws blood and weakens the bull before the matador confronts the dazed animal.

Sousa was particularly fond of horses and by extension other animals. He had never seen a bullfight when he wrote this march, nor read much about them. (It might be relevant to note that in Portuguese bullfights the bull is not harmed.) Had he been more familiar with the subject matter of this march, he doubtless would nave named it something else. Several years later he traveled to Mexico and witnessed his first an only bullfight. In his autobiography he expressed his shock over the event, calling bullfighting a "worthless and unfair sport."

The grisly reality underlying his title unknown to the composer when he wrote it, this march is one of the most light-hearted and charming of all of Sousa's compositions.



© All Music Guide