Juan Francisco de Navas

Juan Francisco de Navas (c. 1650–Madrid, 1719) was a Spanish harpist and composer associated with the Royal Chapel of the Habsburg court. He is of interest above all for his role as a musician in court theatre in the final decades of the seventeenth century, when Madrid's stage music was undergoing a profound transformation between the sung comedy and the zarzuela.

He came from a family of musicians in the service of the monarchy. His father, Juan Gómez de Navas, had sung in the royal chapel from 1654 and was briefly maestro de capilla in 1684; his brother Ignacio also worked for the court. Juan Francisco joined the chapel in 1669 and trained with the harpist and composer Juan Hidalgo. After Hidalgo's death in 1685, he became the principal harpist at court, serving both sacred and secular music. According to archival documents, it was Hidalgo himself who chose him, a decision explained by his dual skill as a harpist and continuo player and by his talent as a composer.

As a writer of stage songs, tonos, tonadas and villancicos, he was regarded by his contemporaries as preserving the principles of musical style and text accentuation established by Hidalgo. Nevertheless, his music shows somewhat more modern traits: longer, more ornamented vocal phrases and obbligato instrumental lines that engage in dialogue with the voice.

By 1694 he had already composed music for at least nine court works, and he described himself as the principal composer of theatre music at court; by around 1700 the number had risen to thirteen. His surviving masterpiece is the three-act zarzuela Destinos vencen finezas, with a libretto by Lorenzo de las Llamosas, premiered on 6 November 1698 with some fifty musical numbers. It was the first zarzuela to be published as a score, in a deluxe edition printed in Madrid in 1699.