On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music The Conquistador of Composition By John Simon How many modern Spanish composers have achieved international stature? Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, yes, though most people...
...The music is a delicate blend of Moorish and Gypsy elements suffusing a Franco-Hispanic base...
...He may have been, as some signs suggest, a closet homosexual...
...Four Spanish Pieces for piano, and the Three Songs on poems with the then fashionable Hispanic themes by Théophile Gautier were his first works to be published...
...Manuel had considered a literary career, though his tastes in literature and poetry were and remained poor...
...The Three-Cornered Hat, first appeared as a pantomime with words, El corregidory la molinera (1917...
...Still, it took two more years of toil before Manuel could afford travel to France, so necessary thenfora Spaniard's musical formation and success...
...The Songs, in the manner of various regions, were long thought to be Falla's own inventions...
...So, as a commission from the renowned American-born Princesse de Polignac, he wrote El retablo de maes Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show, 1919-22) to his own text, adapted from two chapters of Don Quixote...
...The de is to be used only following the first name or an honorific...
...Indeed, on his first visit to Debussy, he declared, "I have always loved French music...
...Record companies have their diabolical ways...
...also from the need for Spanish singers, dancers and musicians, not readily available abroad...
...But they provided something as close to sacred music as the composer, in his exaggerated humility, dared undertake...
...A very competent recent recording that includes The Three-Cornered Hat (Teldec 17145) features Daniel Barenboim's expert pianism, with Placido Domingo songfully conducting the Chicago Symphony...
...While studying at the conservatory, the young man supported himself by giving piano lessons...
...The profoundly Andalusian La vida breve failed to fulfill Falla's hopes: It won the opera prize, but was denied apromised production...
...The Complete Works for Voice and Piano (la mà de guido, 2037) comprises several charming but quite negligible songs, and one later masterpiece, nicely performed...
...the scoring is for harpsichord and chamber orchesti'a.TheimitationRenaissancemusic, at first rather arid-sounding, slowly grows on you...
...Falla is special, in part because his high standards and self-critical rigor made him one of the leastprolific top composers in history...
...But Falla cut a somewhat sorry figure in Paris...
...The one conducted by Eduardo Mata (Dorian 90192) has an authentic flamenco singer and folk guitarists improvising Andalusian songs to the lyrics and tonality set down by Falla...
...They have become so popular (in the other sense) that they now exist in sundry transcriptions and two orchestrations...
...it was adapted from Pedro de Alarcon's famous novella by G. Martinez Sierra...
...It was Debussy who urged Falla to revise La vida breve into two acts —which, with help from Dukas, he did...
...The stormy climate of Spain in the '30s, leading up to the Civil War, was deeply upsetting to Falla, who could side with neither party and whose illness often kept him glued to his chair...
...As he said of Debussy, "He taught us how to write Spanish music...
...Joaquin Turina, for one ortwo pieces...
...Falla told the same man that he preferred Frenchmusic, especially Debussy's, to the prevailing German...
...The revised version, as sung by Colette Boky and conducted by Charles Dutoit with the Montreal Symphony (Decca 410 008), could not be improved upon...
...that his theatrical works center on passionate women may be a form of projection...
...Nothing came, either, of his only identified but unrequited attraction, to the alluring dancer Pastoria Imperio, for whom he was to write El amor brujo (Love the Sorcerer...
...It is played idiosyncratically in the aforementioned Decca compilation by John Constable, with members of the London Sinfonietta under Simon Rattle lending staunch support...
...the master replied, "I myself never...
...Both compilations lack one—but not the same—importantpiece...
...Around that time Debussy and Dukas helped to secure thepublication of Falla 'smusic, aided by a contemporary European vogue for Spanish-style music...
...El amor brigo, is a ballet with song...
...of the last song, "Polo," the marvelous Spanish humorist Ramon Gómez de la Sema mischievously detected "the sigh of a poor little heretic tormentedby the Inquisition...
...Salud, a Gypsy girl, is abandoned by her lover, Paco, for a rich girl of his own station...
...In it, he mounted plays about the imaginary city of Colon (Columbus) and Don Quixote...
...As she resists him, he falls into the millrace...
...In its 1915 version, the work had a smaller orchestra and more spoken dialogue and songs...
...The Paris stay, begun in 1907, was ended in 1914 by World War I. Falla met most of the leading French composers, befriending Debussy, Ravel and Paul Dukas, as well as Albéniz and Turina...
...The parts used in Falla's oratorio, or "scenic cantata," reaffirm the composer's poor literary judgment...
...Candelas, another Gypsy girl, must exorcise the ghost of a faithless lover who, dead, clings to her...
...In his original 1916 program note, Falla asked that it be viewed as more expressive than descriptive, because "something more than the echoes of fiestas and dances has inspired these musical evocations in which pain and mystery also play a part...
...His closest relation to a woman was to his sister, Maria del Carmen, who looked after him during the latter part of his life...
...It was there that his last finished orchestral work, Homenajes—partly orchestrations of earlier instrumental pieces —was created...
...At the same time, Falla also won a prestigious piano competition over the better qualified favorite, Frank Marshall, who later became his friend and interpreter...
...Salud crashes their wedding, bitterly reproaches Paco, and drops dead at his feet...
...In fact, Falla's popular reputation rests almost entirely on four or five works and their derivatives (excerpts, transcriptions), but even connoisseurs will grant him no more than a dozen or so major pieces, some of them very short...
...He also came to know the highly influential Catalan pianist Ricardo Vines, who premiered much new music, including Falla's...
...A grandiose concoction that combines Hercules slaying giants, the sinking of Atlantis as punishment for apostasy, and the Catholic hero Columbus carrying the faith to the continent he discovered, the poem strikes me as a disaster...
...So, with his last work, Falla returned to his beginnings: his puppet theater and the magical-mythical city of Colon...
...Pedrell, to quote Ronald Crichton, "gave him a wider view of Spanish folk music and introduced him to the riches of Spanish polyphony and to the excitements of contemporary music in France and Russia...
...A girlfriend lures the ghost away, so that Candelas and her new novio may exchange the "perfect kiss" that makes them revenant-proof...
...It was as if the poverino Saint Francis had come back to life...
...Falla also borrowed from another Verdaguer opus about Columbus, and included with the Catalan text a Latin passage from Seneca plus bits of a Spanish hymn...
...JoaquinRodrigo, unjustly, for only one, the now overplayed Concierto de Aranjuez...
...He subsequently had several other teachers...
...This 14-minute piece, coinciding with Falla's move from Madrid to Granada, was dedicated to Arthur Rubinstein...
...Having learned to value Spanish folk music from Pedrell, he acquired his understanding of musical impressionism from the French...
...In 1904 the Spanish Academy announced a one-act opera competition...
...Much as I dislike choral music, especially when it is churchy, I find Atlantida impressive, thoughnotthe supreme 20thcentury masterpiece some have proclaimed it...
...He lived on the "exorbitant sum" of five francs a day, and shared his modest meals with birds that followed him around...
...Earlier, Falla had admired a poem of Carlos Fernandez Shaw, based on an Andalusian couplet, "Woe to the wretched female born under a dark sign,/ Woe to her born an anvil instead of a hammer...
...More power to Falla, I say...
...does anyone refer to the author of Don Quixote as de Cervantes...
...With the cellist Segismundo Romero, Falla founded the important Baetic Chamber Orchestra, and concomitantly opted for music of a chamber character...
...In the opening Ay...
...This fallacy—or deFallacy—has infiltrated even the Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, where, in the entry on Rodrigo, Falla appears as de Falla...
...Some 1905 letters from Father Fedriani, his spiritual adviser, counsel Falla to propose to an unidentified girl either now or later, adding: "But foolishness, deductions, interpretations, conjectures, and anything else of this ridiculous and idiotic sort, no, a thousand times no...
...Lasting only about 16 minutes, it pays homage to Debussy, Dukas, Pedrell, and the conductor Enrique Fernandez Arbós, and is best heard under Garcia Navarro with the Württemberg State Orchestra of Stuttgart (Capriccio 10461...
...They were well off, and Manolito was, for instance, given an expensive marionette theater that he spurned for one he built himself...
...Don Quixote and other large puppet figures are watching a puppet play about a Carolingian princess in distress, to whose aid comes the Don, smashing the distressed Master Peter's puppet theater in the process...
...most daring and modern of all Falla's works...
...Both were warmly received...
...This Sombrero de très picos is, like El amor brujo, Andalusian in character...
...Here the chief influences are the Spanish polyphonists of earlier centuries and the experiments and innovations of Stravinsky and Bartok...
...The other ballet with singing...
...In old age he considered them sinful, and tried unsuccessfully to ban their public performances...
...He looked rather like a delivery boy or caretaker in a convent...
...An even gutsier version, by Tony Millan and other Spanish players under Edmon Colomer (Auvidis Valois 4642), is unfortunately coupled with an undistinguished Tricorne...
...the only differences between them are that de los Angeles is a soprano, Berganza a mezzo, and where the EMI sound is a bit too vivid, the Claves is perhaps too remote...
...The objective is to achieve greater spontaneity and contemporary flavor...
...He was plagued by poor health, though the exact nature of his illness has not been clarified...
...The version to get (Auvidis Valois 4685) has Edmon Colomer conducting the Youth Orchestra of Spain, three fine soloists in Simon Estes, Maria Bayo and Teresa Berganza, and several potent choirs...
...As the French critic Pierre Lalo remarked, one wondered whether it wasn't the singer's unscheduled seizure that brought down the curtain...
...Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, yes, though most people probably could not tell them apart...
...More immediately accessible is Psyche, a sixminute setting of a poem by G. J. Aubry, for harpsichord and five instruments...
...Penurious there, he supported himself by, among other things, playing piano for a traveling mime troupe...
...When, after much hesitation, the heirs handed the material to Halffter, the disciple spent years deciphering, pruning, and supplementing...
...The poet and the young composer submitted an opera elaborated from this: La vida breve (A Short Life...
...The miller, evading his captors, returns and misreads the situation...
...The delightful Federico Mompou is beginning to catch on, but who knows much about Xavier Montsalvatge, Ernesto Halffter, or Roberto Gerhard (if indeed he counts as Spanish...
...Natural meticulousness becomes a mania, and Falla was capable of rewriting the same page 10 times...
...the next year it achieved acclaim in Paris and Madrid...
...the dances from both—such as the "Ritual Fire Dance" from the former and the "Miller's Dance" from the latter—exist in various forms as ever-popular concert pieces, and could put the impulse to dance into the most sedate feet...
...But good versions abound, with that of Alicia de Larrocha outstanding...
...Manuel Maria de los Dolores Falla y Matheu was bom in Cadiz to a Valencian businessman and his Catalan wife...
...Each is remarkable...
...No one else has made it on such a Spartan catalogue...
...Living out his last seven years in Argentina, mostly in a charming mountain villa he shared with Maria del Carmen, Falla worked fitfully on Atlantida, his hoped-for masterwork that remained unfinished despite his toiling over it for some 18 years...
...At his death, he left 300 confused and confusing pages ?? Atlantida that, as he said, Halff ter would understand...
...Built around a 15thcentury Castilian folk song, the concerto is, to quote Antonio Gallego, "perhaps the most severe and...
...The version I like best is on the aforementioned Harmonia Mundi disc, with the narrator, as Falla wished, a boy soprano...
...The two great versions ot the Songs are by the superb singers Victoria de los Angeles (EMI 64028) and Teresa Berganza (Oaves 50B403), neither of them currently available...
...Falla's beginnings can be sampled on two CDs...
...La vida breve suffers from a frequent operatic flaw, a poor libretto...
...It is not explained in the material available to me why Falla had to struggle financially for so many years...
...But Monserrat Terruella, on the abovementioned la ma de guido disc, is lovely too...
...Then came the turning point in Falla's work: the folkloric recedes, and in comes a more angular, neoclassical mode...
...Another writer noted that the songs reflected "Spanish folklore much more through the subtle detour of Debussy and Ravel than through the study of Pedrell's researches...
...Similar forces are heard in the Harpsichord Concerto (1923-26), written for the legendary Wanda Landowska, who had played the harpsichord in the Master Peter premiere at the princess' salon...
...In 1913, it was finally mounted successfully in Nice...
...There is no account of either sex or romance in his story...
...Even he suffers from being misnamed "de Falla" on countless record covers and in many musical writings...
...A lifelong, increasingly fanatical Catholic, the composer was shy, retiring, almost ascetic...
...It is part of a two-CD collection, The Essential Falla (Decca 466 128), and also of another Decca collection that is rather too expensive...
...Here each of the six instrumentalists is treated as a soloist...
...The equally minor early piano works, along with some important later ones, are well played by Miguel Baselga on Complete Solo Piano Music (BIS 773...
...It is a setting of several cantos of an epic by the Catalan poetpriest Jacint Verdaguer (1875...
...In 1938, Franco appointed him head of the Academy of the Arts, but by the next year he and his ever-faithful sister left for Buenos Aires...
...Frankly, I prefer the original...
...My favorite CD of it features Victoria de los Angeles (EMI 69590), but is no longer available...
...it was further revised as an orchestral piece for a Paris performance in 1923...
...Itpremiered in London under Ernest Ansermet's baton in 1919...
...There is, however, one certifiable Spanish musical genius, recognized by high and low, expert and layman: Manuel de Falla (1876-1946...
...He got early piano lessons from his mother, with whom he soon played duets...
...A visiting Spanish journalist described him as a "a weak presence, with two broken teeth, always in a well-worn but extremely neat black suit and black tie...
...Poulenc called it his favorite Falla work: "It smells of Spanish wine and manchego, that tasty Spanish cheese...
...He finally came up with two successive treatments, containing of necessity quite a bit of Halffter...
...Known in English as The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife, it has a naughty old magistrate getting the miller arrested so he can seduce his pretty wife...
...One is by Halffter whichl haven't been able to trace on disc: the second, very tactful, is by Luciano Berio, handsomely sung by Alicia Nafé, with Jésus López-Cobos conducting the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra (Denon 75339...
...In her book, Manuel de Falla, Susanne Démarquez quotes Boris de Schloezer: "It is not pastiche but a creation, an innovation in the ancient style...
...But poor health may also have contributed to his sparse output, comparable to that of T. S. Eliot in poetry...
...Pastora Imperio's commission...
...This love, though, was to propel Falla to eminence...
...also with Claire Powell accompanied by Nicholas Cleobury conducting Aquarius (Virgin 90790...
...A key work is Falla's piano masterpiece, the Fantasia Baetica or Bética (from the ancient Roman name of Andalusia) of 1919...
...A domestic of Moorish descent sang the cantejondo (a traditional Andalusian deep song of Arabic or Gypsy origin) around the house...
...The next two Falla successes, his ballets, are his most famous efforts—but to complicate matters, they exist in two versions...
...The more sumptuous version, usually known by its French title, Le Tricorne, was prepared for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, choreographed by Massine, and designed by Picasso...
...In his Falla, Luis Campodonico describes the products of the 15 ensuing Granada years as "a profound, meditated music: years of work following feverish sketches...
...Research by Garcia Matos and others has revealed otherwise, but of course Falla has transmuted them into subtler, more sophisticated compositions...
...or, most idiosyncratically, with the cantaora (flamenco singer) Ginesa Ortega under Josep Pons' direction (Harmonia Mundi 945213...
...Is that so...
...Did his father lose his money...
...There are three singers: the boy narrator, the puppeteer and the Don...
...You can find it on the already-mentioned Denon disc...
...This is a mini-opera for puppets, something his new young friend Federico Garcia Lorca got him interested in...
...Of the trifles, "Your Little Black Eyes" was to become a hit in the U. S., much to Falla's embarrassment...
...or was Manuel too proud to ask for parental subsidy...
...Like so much Falla, it has overtones of religious music, but its austere beginning softens through its 15-minute progress...
...Though it is hard to tell how much of it is Falla, I agree with the Falla expert Jean-Charles Hoffelé, "Pooh to the quarrel about various versions, this interpretation, ardent, violent, and of unparalleled sonic splendor, topples all barriers: Atlantida is a masterpiece indeed...
...When Falla returned to Spain in 1914, he carried in his one suitcase two of his masterpieces: the finished 7 canciones populäres Espanolas (7 Popular Spanish Songs), and the unfinished Noches en los jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain...
...A prizewinning student at the Madrid Conservatory, he tried his hand at writing zarzuelas, one of which got produced and flopped...
...His most important teacher there was the eminent musicologist and composer Felipe Pedrell, who took him on as his only private pupil...
...Meanwhile the magistrate, obliged to put on the miller's clothes, is mistaken by his own men for the miller, and punitively tossed about in a blanket...
...Angry, he dons the magistrate's clothes and goes off to seduce his comely spouse, equally unsuccessfully...
...Nights in the Gardens of Spain began as a set of separate piano nocturnes, but was turned at Vines' suggestion into a three-movement piano concerto, evoking gardens in and around Granada, a city as of then unvisited by Falla...
...She pulls him out, puts him to bed, and hangs his clothes and the three-cornered hat of his office up to dry...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
