On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Homage to a Catalan By John Simon Some years ago I wrote here briefly about the marvelous orchestral music of the superb Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002). Now...
...IF Puss in Boots represents Montsalvatge's early phase, andAn Offstage Voice the beginning of the final one, the already mentioned middle period— variously named Antillean, American or West Indian—is displayed in some of the composer's finest songs...
...Angela repeatedly voices her repugnance and horror, and declares that it is Mario who is dead to her now...
...The music truly cradles the endearingly naive words by a Uruguayan poet, and can also be heard sung somewhat more operatically by the wonderful Isabel Bayrakdarian on her concert disc Azulâo (CBC Records MVCD 1164...
...The voices on both these opera discs are decent rather than outstanding...
...Volume Two has none...
...There ensues a dramatic duet in the best Pucciniesque manner and, even more effective, Angela's aria when Mario grabs her and tries to force himself upon her...
...Soon Xavier began composing, andin 1934his Three Impromptus won the Conservatory's most prestigious award, the Rabell Prize...
...It boasts the collaboration and supervision of the accomplished North Carolina pianist Mac McLure, a specialist in the music of Montsalvatge, whose friend he was during the composer's later years...
...Then she discovers a spool for the tape recorder...
...He kept busily composing in all musical genres, but oddly got less international recognition than some of his Spanish contemporaries or near-contemporaries...
...of the 20 or so ballets he wrote for a company he was associated with, for instance, not one is available...
...We get "havaneres" for habaneras, and, in a note by Enrique Franco, "un dominador màgico" rendered as "a magical commander...
...This has been referred to as Montsalvatge's eclectic period, although he was able to blend these influences and add his own very personal touches, so that the results never sounded noticeably derivative...
...This in itself is insolent enough...
...These discs are reasonably well produced, but the booklets that come with them are nothing short of scandalous...
...Nana" is another cradle song as charming as the former, redolent with innocent tenderness...
...We hear Claudio—the voice and thin orchestration made to sound as if coming from the tape...
...Angela wishes to be left alone with Claudio's voice that pleads for love, and Mario leaves angrily...
...Contrastingly, in "I Will Not Leave You, My Love," one of the composer's earliest songs, rewritten in old age, his exquisitely bittersweet music reaches its apogee...
...nobody has done this sort of thing better...
...Pretty soon he is irritating Angela, and now it is his turn to express a sense of rejection...
...Roberto Gerhard, the third major Catalan composer, strikes me as usually too cerebral...
...laments Claudio (Antonio Comas) in one of those slightly nasal Spanish tenor voices, adding to the illusion of a tape recording...
...Mario is sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper, and insensitively makes fun of Claudio's taped words...
...It begins, "Cuando vestra mano llegue hasta estas labios miosjen vuestros dedos tanfrios seran clavel sobre nieve" (When your hand reaches up to these lips of mine,/ On your fingers, so cold, there will be carnations on the snow...
...As Mario leaves, she bangs the door shut behind him, weeping, while outside Mario sings a yearning variation on the Sentimi motif...
...The opera begins as Angela, in elegant mourning, enters looking weary or annoyed...
...There is a langorous loveliness to the music that is a Montsalvatge specialty...
...Scene 3 opens in darkness with the chorus singing a melancholy commentary on Angela's budding response to Claudio's pleading: "Your voice trembles as you plead for love...
...The music for those opening words becomes a leitmotif that keeps cropping up in various guises throughout this 45minute or so work...
...It was translated into Italian by a professor at the University of Barcelona, doubtless so as to come even closer to the works of Puccini and Gian Carlo Menotti admired by Xavier...
...the libretto by Nestor Lujân follows faithfully Charles Perrault's famous fairy tale, except for a few details...
...The music for the songs is uneven, but can compete at its best with any lied ever composed...
...He gets fairly short shrift from The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, likewise from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, in which, however, Enrique Falco (author also of a book on the composer) concludes, "Whatever the technique, Montsalvatge's music is always structurally firm, imaginatively orchestrated and motivated by an inner core ofconviction...
...Running her fingers across Claudio's bookcase, she briefly inspects an old snapshot, then tears it up...
...Una voce in off has a libretto by Montsalvatge from an idea suggested by his friend Joan Puigevalls...
...The cat and the princess (soprano and mezzo) and the princess and the miller (tenor) have sparkling duets, and both the king (baritone) and ogre (bass) are given fine comic arias...
...The music for the phone conversation turns into a tango, presumably because of that dance's sexual implications...
...Only the last is fulllength, but unfortunately it is not yet available on disc...
...I can't vouch for the Catalan, but the other languages are full of gross mistakes and misprints...
...She throws some papers into the fireplace: "No love letters," sings the chorus...
...in the opera, he gets also a plumed hat and a sword made ofbone with which he kills the ogre-turned-mouse...
...Morning Glory" is a further terse gem, and the disc concludes with "The Shepherd Facing the Harbor," to a poem by the famous but vastly overrated Spaniard Vicente Aleixandre, yet even out of this Montsalvatge's music manages to create poetry...
...On the second, untranslated song disc, I skip the items in Catalan, which I don't know, and proceed to the others, as sung by Mateu and Comas...
...the mostly dubious English translations are riddled with every conceivable and inconceivable error...
...Moreover, in the opera and song texts, the English does not appear on facing pages with the Spanish, inflicting an awkward flipping back and forth on nonSpanish speakers who want to follow the original...
...Angela, unmoved by what she hears, smokes and changes into a robe, then stops the tape recorder and phones her lover, Mario, to disparage her husband...
...She is about to pitch that, too, but changes her mind and puts it on...
...All contributed to Montsalvatge's cosmopolitan musical language, often called "patrician" because it eschews facile crowd-pleasing devices...
...Angela is the soprano Rosa Mateu, an old Montsalvatge hand, and the baritone (Mario) is Àngel Òdena...
...There is some engagement with Montsalvatge's politics...
...Elsewhere, Rosa Mateu is said to have "intervened in the premiere of the opera Babel 46" And so on and on...
...It is a melody soaring in helpless defiance against a sober, fatalistic-sounding accompaniment...
...whether by deliberate imitation of old church music or not, it is, with its fivefold refrain, rather monotonous...
...If some annotators manage better than others, none fully satisfies...
...Lizzard [sic] Is Crying," we get, "A large sky without people/ Loads in tis ballon the birds/ The sun, capitan, round, is wera a satin jacket...
...Volume One does have English translations, such as they are...
...Angela hugs the tape recorder and joins in an ingenious duet in which Claudio sings full sentences, but she only passionate, disjointed fragments...
...But relatively little of his work can be found on CD...
...Disc One, sung by Martins with McClure on piano, begins with six Songs for Children, based on poems by Federico Garcia Lorca...
...Danse," to a saucily surreal text by the French poet Léon-Paul Fargue, is rendered by Àngels Civit in dubious French and voice, but anyway does not seem up to Montsalvatge's best...
...Where, I wonder, is the enterprising opera management with the wisdom to present these two short operas as a double bill...
...Furthermore, the booklet notes tend to be either far too vague or to concentrate on matters of scant interest to Anglophone readers, being often no more than lists of when and where the works were first performed, whom they were dedicated to, who the conductors andperformers were, and what sort of receptions—usually glowing—they were accorded...
...Sono un Siciliano" again from Babel 46, sung by Comas, mixes the exile's nostalgia for his homeland with patriotic fervor unto death, and must be wonderfully effective as orchestrated in the opera...
...She starts after him, but changes her mind, snuggles up to the tape recorder and utters the words of love she had just directed at Mario to Claudio instead...
...The charming "Bergerette," in French, is an extract from the polyglot opera Babel 46...
...The notable influences on him were Mussorgsky, Stravinsky and Les Six, along with Satie and Ravel—but significantly no Spaniards, perhaps the reason for his foreign neglect...
...The New Oxford History of Music does not even mention him, nor does the scrupulously thorough Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians or the usually astute Norman Lebrecht's Companion to 20th-century Music...
...The brief overture promptly manages a winning blend of the melodious and the rousing...
...Now I want to turn, at greater length, to his operas and art songs...
...From this, with a jolt, we switch to comic music as Mario, a lighter in hand, sneaks into Angela's dark apartment to droll, film-cartoonishly melodramatic accompaniment, with the bassoon sounding especially cheeky...
...Deshecha de romance que cantaron los seraphines" (Tailpiece to a Romance Sung by the Seraphs), offered to the child Jesus, is another medieval religious song...
...In Scene 2 the chorus sings about Claudio's devotion to Angela, and she sings a protracted, sensual vocalise, a variation on the Sentimi leitmotif...
...We read: "Either the reactionary chiefs did not notice it...
...The Sonnet to Manuel de Falla," a lesser poem by Garcia Lorca, gets a nice but somewhat perfunctory treatment...
...She plays some of the tape over the phone to Mario, then lies down on the sofa hugging the phone, and sings a gorgeous declaration of love to him as she renounces Claudio...
...But Angela is back at the tape recorder listening to the second half of Claudio's complaint: "I escape from an unbearable life;/ Hear the voice of him who speaks to you,/ Angela, him who adores you...
...The booklet's uncredited English translation—verbose, mispunctuated, and not even matching the original's syllabic count—has, "When I take your soft white hands and press my lips gently upon them,/ my warm kiss on such cold fingers, will be, will be [sic] just like roses on snow...
...or they forbade him," which, of course, should be forgave him...
...As the lover is about to smash the tape recorder, Angela rushes in and interposes herself...
...lullabies, evidently, were a further Montsalvatge forte...
...Here sloppiness reaches new heights...
...The two one-acters are on Columna Musica 1CMO103 and 1CM0087, respectively...
...This shepherd's song is full of humor delightfully conveyed by Martins...
...There is a French feel to it, with merely a brief suggestion of Spain...
...Once again Antoni Ros Marbà and the Liceu Orchestra perform impeccably...
...There followed his so-called Antillean period, featuring West Indian Calypso rhythms brought back to Spain by Civil War refugees returning from the Americas...
...They are in Catalan, Spanish and English—plus Italian and French when a song or opera text calls for it...
...Already by the second of these, "Mr...
...worse yet, at neither address are such translations to be found...
...Born in Girona, just north of Barcelona, Montsalvatge got his training early (1923-36) at the Barcelona Conservatory with a number of fine teachers, among them the composer-conductor Eduardo Toldr...
...At the time Barcelona was a center of musical activity where one could hear the works of Manuel de Falla, Stravinsky and Schönberg conducted by thencomposers, and catch eminent musicians such as Pablo Casals, Anton Rubinstein and Wanda Landowska, as well as the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev...
...they are somewhat flaccid and self-indulgent, like much of Lorca's poetry...
...They have all the charm and variety you could ask for, offer comedy and drama, and provide the director, designers and singers with rewarding material to dig into...
...He went on to compose over 100 works, winning more prizes and becoming a member of both the Catalan and Spanish Academies...
...Why did you hate me so...
...It begins with "Cradle Song for a Little Black Boy," probably his best known work...
...Oraçao," an anonymous Portuguese prayer to the infant Jesus, has the haunting quality of Portuguese saudades (wistful songs...
...The music here is a cunning progression from the sarcastic to the lyrical...
...Montsalvatge's winning first song cycle (1945-49) follows...
...The disc opener is Montsalvatge's second song cycle (1953), pleasant but less successful than his first...
...Still, the song has a movingly naïve piety, well captured by the setting...
...This mess should read, "A sky, wide and without people/ Ascends in its balloon to the birds./ The sun, rotund captain,/ Wears a satin jacket...
...The song is a fetching fantasy about sailing away with one's beloved...
...Four Short Poems by Josep Carner demonstrates Montsalvatge's masterly concision: lyrics of only a few words are matched by a few notes equal in eloquence and memorability to much longer songs...
...three dances of the transformed ogre—as lion, parrot and mouse—are particularly effective...
...It is Claudio's great, sad, posthumous love letter, beginning, "Sentimi, Angela" (Hear me, Angela), questioning why she ignored, tortured and (apparently) drove him to suicide...
...That aria begins, "Reich mir noch einmal zum Abschied die Hände" (Give me your hands once more in farewell...
...The chorus, in solemn melody, wonders why she so despised Claudio, her husband, whom she swore to cherish in good and bad fortune...
...Puss in Boots was premiered in Barcelona's Teatre del Liceu under the baton of the composer-conductor Carlos Surinach (the booklet, absurdly, has Surinach...
...The cat's music, only occasionally suggestive of meows, purrs and feline spits, is always light and bright, playful but not childish...
...Two volumes of these have now been issued on Columna Musica 0079 and 0080...
...When deployed, that best puts him into the ranks of the last century's finest composers...
...The other pieces here include the touching "Cancó amorosa," with a melody reminiscent of an old Catalan love song, alluded to also in the fourth of the Cançiones y danzas by Federico Mompou, the other great Catalan composer and Montsalvatge's friend...
...It appears, though, that a collected or, indeed, complete edition of his works is beginning to come out on the Columna Musica label from Barcelona...
...The orchestral interludes, as so often in modern opera, are even more tuneful than the singing...
...Montsalvatge also served as music critic for a number of important publications, and was appointed professor at the Barcelona Superior Conservatory, acquiring a batch of honorary doctorates...
...MONTSALVATGE wrote three operas: El gato con botas (Puss in Boots, 1948), Una voce in off (An Offstage Voice, 1961), and Babel 46 (1967...
...The third and last phase shows traces of Bartok, Hindemith and Olivier Messiaen...
...I suppose a sword is more theatrical than claws...
...Incidentally, coincidence or not, the first few notes of this aria are identical to those of another from a once highly popular Viennese operetta, also made into a movie, Paul Abraham's Viktoria und ihr Husar...
...The booklet's last page states, "Translations of the songs are available to down load [sic] at www.columnamusica.com or by e-mail from info@columnamusica.com...
...Two years later he received the Pedrell Prize for his Suite burlesca...
...The very capable orchestra of the Great Theater of the Liceu is conducted by the splendid Antoni Ros Marbà, and the singers are all apt enough, especially the mezzo Marisa Martins (cat) and the basso cantante Stefano Palatchi (ogre...
...Finally, Angela, Claudio and the chorus, each in its appropriate way, sing together as darkness envelops the stage...
...Laurinha, amor mio" is a tender aria from Babel 46, in Italian, making me impatient for the announced full opera, "?a Vierge couronnée" a tiny medieval French religious ditty, is pleasant but slight...
...Pianto della Madonna" by the early Italian Jacopone da Todi, is here arranged for soprano and mezzo, the latter being Angels Civit, wife of the composer's doctor and friend, but, regrettably, not very talented...
...The clever cat in the original requests only a sack and boots...
...My own favorite is the cat's wooing of the princess for the miller with a letter allegedly written by him...
...Lujân's dialogue is quite appealing, and the music, as befits a fairy tale, is enchanting...
...the tenor Antonio Comas (miller), the baritone Enric Martinez-Castignani (king) and the soprano Isabel Monar (princess) are not far behind...
...It is surrounded by four other delicious songs, funny or sweetly feelingful, although the texts by the Spanish surrealist Alberti, Guillen and Puss in Boots' Lujân are not up to the music...
...Thus Miquel Desclot comments that, although the composer was a Franco sympathizer, he set poems by such known Communists as Rafael Alberti and the Afro-Cuban Nicolas Guillen...
Vol. 87 • July 2004 • No. 4
