Manuel de Falla on Music Theory Print

Atlántida (opera)

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Original legend on which the opera is based#

Verdaguer brought together pre-history and history: a child (Christopher Columbus) is the sole survivor of a shipwreck of a Genoese boat off the Spanish coast. After reaching shore, he is adopted by a hermit who recounts the history of the earth and seas. He begins the legend with Alcide (Heracles) arriving from Greece to attack the Atlanteans reaching the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. He finds a huge fire started by Geryon, a three-headed African monster. King Tubal of the Pyrenees is killed and his daughter Pyrene gives her father to Alcide imploring him to set forth to kill the monster, before dying. Alcide decides to make a port where a white barque (barca) had landed. After arriving in Cádiz from Barcelona, Alcide goes to the Hesperides, finds the orange tree, Atlas’s widow and three daughters, and kills the dragon wrapped in the tree defending the entry to the continent. The Hesperides die (ascending to the heavens as the Pleiades) and Alcide returns to Cádiz; he kills Geryon and sees the waters break over Mount Calpe and rush over Atlantis. Still accompanied by the hermit, the adult Columbus dreams of unlocking the mystery of Atlantis and appeals to Queen Isabella of Spain who gives him jewels to pay for his venture. The old man bids Columbus to fly.

El amor brujo

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Gitanería (1915)#

El amor brujo was commissioned in 1914 as a gitanería, or danced gypsy entertainment, dedicated to the flamenco dancer and cantaora Pastora Imperio. It was finished the next year but its premiere, on 15 April at the Teatro Lara in Madrid, proved unsuccessful. This version, in two scenes, is for dancers and actors and is scored for cantaora voice and chamber ensemble.

First revised version (1916)#

Falla then revised the ballet by removing its spoken dialogue, replacing the cantaora part with three songs for mezzo-soprano and enlarging the accompaniment for sextet and small orchestra. The plot was slightly changed as well. This more concise version, still in two scenes, was played on 12 March 1916 by members of the Madrid Symphony Orchestra under Enrique Fernández Arbós. But it was modified several times, starting the following year when Fernández Arbós proposed a production at the Teatro Real.

El retablo de maese Pedro

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Performance history#

In 1919 Winnaretta Singer, aka la Princesse Edmond de Polignac, commissioned from Falla a piece that could be performed in her salon, using her own elaborate puppet theater. (Her other commissions included Igor Stravinsky’s Renard and Erik Satie’s Socrate, although neither of those works had its premiere in her private theater.) The work was completed in 1923. Falla decided to set an episode from Cervantes’ Don Quixote that actually depicts a puppet play. Don Quixote watches a puppet show and gets so drawn into the action that he seeks to rescue the damsel in distress, only to destroy poor Master Peter’s puppet theater in the process. Falla’s original plan for the Princess’s theater was a two-tiered, play-within-a-play approach: large puppets representing Quixote, Master Peter, and the others in attendance, and small figures for Master Peter’s puppets. The three singers would be with the orchestra in the pit, rather than onstage. After a concert performance in Seville on 23 March 1923, that is how it was performed with the Princess’s puppets in the music room of her Paris estate on 25 June of that year, with Vladimir Golschmann conducting. Hector Dufranne sang Don Quijote (Quixote), Wanda Landowska played the harpsichord (Falla composed his 1926 Harpsichord Concerto for her in appreciation), and Ricardo Viñes and Emilio Pujol were among the artists and musicians serving as stagehands. Also at the premiere was Francis Poulenc, who met Landowska for the first time; she asked him to write a harpsichord concerto for her, and his Concert champêtre was the result.

Harpsichord Concerto (Falla)

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History#

Falla had met the dedicatee on several occasions in the early 1920s, and by the time she participated in the Paris premiere of Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro in June 1923, he had already decided to write a concerto for her. Although there was never a formal commission, composition began in October 1923 but work proceeded slowly. Landowska first planned to perform the work in the 1923–24 season. When Falla found it impossible to meet that deadline, Landowska discussed with Leopold Stokowski a performance as part of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1924–25 season, but again Falla could not finish the work in time. The premiere finally took place in Barcelona on 5 November 1926, with further performances in New York and Boston. The Concerto was the last lengthy work Falla completed. Although there are several subsequent pieces in his catalogue that are important for their content, none of them lasts more than ten minutes, and his final, monumental project, the opera-oratorio Atlántida, on which he worked for twenty years, remained unfinished at his death. It is commonly regarded as a model example of both mysticism (of a sort originating in Spanish religious tradition) and a severe and ascetic form of neoclassicism (as opposed to the “frivolous” neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky).

La vida breve (opera)

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Synopsis#

:Time: 20th century :Place: Granada

Act 1#

Afternoon and sunset in the (gypsy) Albaicín district A male chorus of anvil workers plies their trade at the local forge. The young gypsy, Salud, is passionately in love with a young well-to-do man named Paco. She does not know, and Paco does not tell her, that he is already engaged to a woman of his social class. Her uncle, Sarvaor (Salvador), and her grandmother (La abuela) have discovered this, and they try to prevent Salud from interrupting Paco’s wedding after she learns the truth.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain

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Notable performances#

The pianist at the first performance was not Viñes, but José Cubiles. The first performance was given on April 9, 1916, at Madrid’s Teatro Real, with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid conducted by Enrique Fernández Arbós. Viñes first played the work in its San Sebastián premiere, shortly after the world premiere, with the same orchestra. Arthur Rubinstein was in the audience that night, and he introduced the work to Buenos Aires. The Paris premiere took place in January 1920, with the pianist Joaquín Nin playing under Fernández Arbós. The composer himself was the soloist at the London premiere in 1921, at a Queen’s Hall concert under the baton of Edward Clark. Other notable performers of the work include Alicia de Larrocha. De Larrocha recorded the work, for example with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1983.

Ritual Fire Dance

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Plot#

In de Falla’s ballet El amor brujo, a young Andalusian gypsy girl called Candela is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. To get rid of him, all the gypsies make a large circle around their campfire at midnight. Candela then performs the Ritual Fire Dance. This causes the ghost to appear, with whom she then dances. As they whirl around faster and faster, the ghost is drawn into the fire, making it vanish forever.

Siete canciones populares españolas

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Lyrics#

All the texts deal with love and the courting process, whether playfully, seriously, or tragically. The first song, for example, alludes to the importance of virginity to a girl’s value on the marriage market, though the text itself is about a shop reducing the price of a delicate cloth due to a stain. “Nana” is a lullaby: it deals with love’s outcome. “Polo” expresses a wild desire for revenge on an unfaithful lover.

Soneto a Córdoba

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Background#

Soneto a Córdoba was written after the sonnet A Córdoba (1585) by Luis de Góngora, with the incipit “¡Oh excelso muro, oh torres coronadas!” (“Oh lofty wall, oh towers crowned”). Composed to commemorate the tricentenary of Góngora’s death, It was finished in 1927 in Granada, Spain, in the same city that the original poem was written. It was premiered on May 14, 1927, at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. It was initially published by Oxford University Press in 1932, and has been reprinted by J. & W. Chester since 1956.

The Three-Cornered Hat

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History#

In 1916-1917, Manuel de Falla composed the music for a two-scene pantomime El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife). The plot was from Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s 1874 novel of the same title, adapted for the stage by María Martínez Sierra. The work premiered at Madrid’s Teatro Eslava on April 6, 1917. Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes had been introduced to de Falla by Igor Stravinsky during the company’s first visit to Spain in 1916. Diaghilev requested permission to use de Falla’s already-completed Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) and the work-in-progress El corregidor y la molinera for future choreographies, but only managed to secure permission for the latter. In preparation for staging Spanish choreography, Diaghilev and Leonid Massine enlisted the services of teenage dancer Félix Fernández García, who accompanied the two men with de Falla on a tour of Spain in July 1917, introducing them to dancers and performances in Zaragoza, Toledo, Salamanca, Burgos, Sevilla, Córdoba, and Granada. Massine, Pablo Picasso, and de Falla worked separately on the choreography, sets/costumes, and music for the ballet over subsequent months; after some delays, the ballet was eventually premiered in London at the Alhambra Theatre on 22 July 1919. De Falla was called home to Granada at the last moment to see his dying mother. Ernest Ansermet conducted the premiere in place of de Falla. Francisco Giménez-Rodríguez has investigated the performance history in Hungary of The Three-Cornered Hat (A háromszögletű kalap in Hungarian). Michael Christoforidis has studied the critical reaction to the initial performances of the ballet in Britain.

The Three-Cornered Hat (album)

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Recording#

The booklet accompanying the CD release of the album does not name its producer or engineer or reveal where it was taped, but does state that it was recorded digitally.

Cover art#

Apart from minor differences in lettering, the covers of the American and British LP, cassette and CD versions of the album are all the same, and were designed and illustrated by Chris Verschoor.

Critical reception#

Edward Greenfield reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in April 1983, comparing it with previous recordings of The Three-Cornered Hat conducted by Ernest Ansermet, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and Eduardo Mata. Ansermet and Frühbeck de Burgos, he thought, had conveyed the music’s “earthier qualities” better than Previn, and Frühbeck de Burgos was “more idiomatically Spanish”. The chief virtue of Previn’s album was that it was more successful than its predecessors in bringing out “a chamber-like quality in the detail and precision of the orchestral writing”. The lucidity of Previn’s performance reminded Greenfield of “Stravinsky and Ravel ballets on the one hand and neo-classic models on the other”. “The ear is ravished by the texture”, he wrote. The other salient feature of Previn’s reading was his “characteristic emphasis on rhythmic qualities”. Greenfield was ambivalent about the brief vocal passage at the beginning of the work. Frederica von Stade’s voice was “lovely”, he thought, but it was so prominent in the mix that she seemed to be introducing the ballet as if standing in a spotlight at the front of the stage. On the comparison discs, the soprano soloists sounded further away, providing “instant evocation of Spanish atmosphere”. In every other respect the album’s engineering was exemplary, and certain to delight audiophiles. “A modern digital recording, even by Philips standards unusually refined and beautifully balanced, brings out beauties in Falla’s scoring in this, his masterpiece, that one might not expect”. Greenfield revisited the album in Gramophone in August 1984 to assess how it sounded after being remastered for CD. On this occasion, he compared it with a new Decca release of The Three-Cornered Hat performed by Huguette Tourangeau and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Charles Dutoit. Once again he relished the way in which “Previn’s crisp and rhythmic account of the Falla ballet brought out its Stravinskian associations”, but he felt that the sound of the newer recording was preferable to the “closeness and dryness” of the old. “Outstandingly warm and evocative”, Dutoit’s disc had “far more space round the instruments” than Previn’s, yet was no less revealing of inner detail. Philips’s forward balancing of von Stade seemed as unfortunate an error of judgment as ever - Tourangeau, like the singers on Ansermet’s, Frühbeck de Burgos’s and Mata’s recordings, had been recorded as if from a distance, and was “far more effective” as a result. It was clear that, all in all, Dutoit’s CD was the better of the two. The album was included in BBC Radio 3’s Release on 4 June 1983, and was also reviewed in The complete Penguin stereo record and cassette guide, The Penguin guide to compact discs, cassettes and LPs, Dance and Dancers, Fanfare and High Fidelity (where von Stade’s contribution was judged disappointingly “bland”).