MANUEL DE FALLA AND JOAQUIN TURINA:
MAESTROS FROM ANDALUCIA
Notes by Adam Kent
Spaniards in Paris
Writing in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in 1912, Joaquín Turina offered the following description of his debut in Paris at which his newly composed piano quintet was first performed:
“Already in place on stage and with the first violinist’s bow poised to begin, we saw a fat gentleman with a huge black beard and an enormous wide-brimmed hat rush in, flushed with haste. A minute later, in absolute silence, the performance began. After a while, the fat gentleman turned to his neighbor, a slight young man, and asked him, ‘Is the composer an Englishman?’ ‘No sir, he’s from Seville,’ replied the slight young man, completely stupefied. The performance continued, and in the end they were as one, the fat gentleman bursting into the artists’ room accompanied by the slight young man. He approached me and with the utmost courtesy pronounced his name: Isaac Albéniz. A half-hour later the three of us were strolling arm-in-arm across the Champs-Elysées in the graying autumn twilight; after crossing the Place de la Concorde we settled down in a bar on Rue Royale, and there, amidst champagne and pastries, I experienced the most complete metamorphoses of my life. There the patria chica began to shine; there we spoke of Spanish music with ‘vistas towards Europe,’ and from there I left completely changed in my ideas. We were three Spaniards in our little group in a corner of Paris, and we had to make great efforts for the music of Spain. In shall never forget that scene, nor do I think will the slight young man, who was none other than the great Manuel de Falla.”
Like so many great Spanish composers of their generation, Joaquín Turina and Manuel de Falla, both natives of Andalucía, established themselves in Paris in the period leading up to the First World War. There the two composers formed a life-long friendship, at one point living as neighbors at the Hotel Kléber. Falla was already an accomplished musician who had won two prizes in Spain in 1905—one for pianists sponsored by the Ortiz y Cussó firm, the other organized by the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando for composition. For this latter prize, Falla composed his first fully mature masterwork, the one-act opera La vida breve. Paris was to provide a professional launching pad for Falla, a chance to pursue the performances and publication of his music which had eluded him in his native country. Contemporary French musical culture also furnished Falla with much inspiration, especially the work of Claude Debussy, with whom Falla eventually established a cordial if sometimes tense relationship. Turina arrived in Paris in 1905 somewhat less fully formed as a musician. He came to study, enrolling in the composition class of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum and the piano studio of Moritz Moszkowski. Indeed, as the above anecdote makes clear, Turina’s devotion to a nationalistic idiom evolved only after he had mastered a traditionally mainstream approach to musical form and harmony.
Turina’s posthumous reputation has suffered somewhat from the comparison with Falla. The latter composer was indeed a rare phenomenon, an artist who seemed to reinvent himself with each major work. It can be hard to fathom that the composer of the perfumed, impressionistic Noches en los jardines de España could evoke the rawness of Andalusian gypsy culture in El amorbrujo, the elegance of eighteenth-century Castile in El sombrero de tres picos, and the siglo-de-oro mysticism of El Retablo de Maese Pedro all within little more than a decade. Turina, though, was a far more prolific artist, who discovered his voice as a young composer in Paris and produced an impressive body of work in a wide range of genres. His style may not have evolved as dramatically as Falla’s, but his musical presence is equally powerful and immediately recognizable. The 125th anniversary of Turina’s birth furnishes the ideal occasion to juxtapose the work of these two maestros from Andalucía.
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Transcriptions from El Retablo de Maese Pedro, El amor brujo, and El sombrero de tres picos
El Retablo de Maese Pedro owes its existence to a commission in 1919 from Princess Edmond de Polignac of an opera for marionette theater to be staged at her Parisian residence. Falla settled on the titeres scene from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which the novel’s eponymous hero witnesses a puppet show and loses all perspective on the actuality of the drama. The acerbic, neo-Renaissance style of the writing is enhanced by Falla’s use of the harpsichord in the original instrumentation, one of the first instances of newly composed music for that instrument in the twentieth century and a harbinger of the wonderful harpsichord concerto Falla would produce a few years later.
El amor brujo was inspired by the legendary gypsy bailarina Pastora Imperio, who in 1914 requested a work from Falla she could “sing and dance.” The ballet which emerged is based on a scenario by Martínez Sierra, who adapted a tale of love and obsession related to him by the dancer’s mother. The music impressively evokes the cante jondo vocal style Falla would later study in such depth with Federico García Lorca. The most celebrated numbers from the ballet—the “Danza ritual del fuego” (Ritual Fire Dance) and the “Danza del terror” (Dance of Terror)—owe their popularity to piano transcriptions triumphantly connected to Arthur Rubinstein.
As premiered in London in 1919, El sombrero de tres picos was the product of a collaboration between several of Europe’s brightest stars. Falla composed the ballet score, Pablo Picasso provided costume and scenic design, and Leonid Massine undertook the choreography in a production by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. The scenario, popular in origins, was based on a novel by Antonio Pedro de Alarcón. The famed “Danza del molinero” (Miller’s Dance), a ruggedly masculine farruca, was composed on twenty-four hours notice at the suggestion of Diaghilev, who felt his lead male dancer Massine needed a solo to complement the more extensive “Danza de la molinera” (Dance of the Miller’s Wife) already in the score. This dance has also achieved notoriety in the piano transcription heard tonight.
Pièces espagnoles
Along with La vida breve, the Pièces espagnoles were the first fruits of Falla’s compositional maturity. Each of the four pieces evokes a particular region (colony, in the case of “Cubana”) of Spain in an idiom at once polyphonic in texture and impressionistic in sonority. The collection—begun in Spain before Falla’s departure for Paris in 1907—is dedicated to Isaac Albéniz.
The opening “Aragonesa” presents a lively jota in alternation with a more languorous secondary thematic area, derived from the triplet figurations of the first. “Cubana” repeatedly juxtaposes measures of 6/8 and ¾ in the seductive style of a Cuban guajira. “Montañesa” recalls the delicate texture of Debussy’s work, with its numerous bell imitations and fragmentary handling of thematic materials. A lively middle section quotes a popular regional folk song. The concluding “Andaluza” presages the gypsy outbursts Falla would later immortalize in “Polo,” the last of the Siete canciones populares españolas, in the ballet El amorbrujo, and in the final movement of his Noches en los jardines de España. All four pieces end in quiet contemplation.
Fantasía bætica
Having scored such a triumph with his transcription of the “Ritual Fire Dance,” Arthur Rubinstein eagerly commissioned a piano solo from Falla. The Fantasía bætica, completed in 1919, was originally entitled simply “Fantasía,” but Falla’s London-based publisher Chester requested a more distinctive name. “Bætica” is an allusion to the ancient Roman province corresponding to modern-day Andalucía. The music, though, has little to do with toga-clad senators and philosophers and much more to do with the gypsy culture of that region. The work unfolds as an epic sonata form, full of impressive guitar imitations, convincing approximations of cante jondo, and the dark-hued state of obsessive possession sometimes termed duende. Rubinstein performed the work on several occasions, but ultimately abandoned it, apparently disappointed by its length and difficulty. It has been left to more recent generations of pianists to claim for it its rightful place as one of the masterpieces of the Spanish piano literature.
Joaquín Turina (1882-1949)
Danzas fantásticas, Op. 22
The three Danzas fantásticas were composed originally for solo piano in 1918, although they have become better known in Turina’s orchestration. In their way, the dances complement Falla’s Pièces espagnoles, in that each one alludes to a specific region of Spain. The pieces were loosely inspired by La orgía, a novel by Turina’s friend José Mas. “Exaltación” is a jota, the quintessential dance of Aragón, and is prefaced by the following citation from Mas’s novel: “It seemed as if the figures of that incomparable picture were moving inside the chalice of a flower.” “Ensueño” is cast in the unmistakable 5/8 meter and dotted rhythm of the Basque zortziko. Mas’s words introduce the piece: “ The guitar’s strings sounded the lament of a soul helpless under the weight of bitterness.” “Orgía” is another Andalusian farruca, whose rugged swagger is summed up in Mas’s effusive prose: “The perfume of the flowers merged with the aroma of manzanilla, and from the bottom of raised glasses, full of wine incomparable as incense, joy flowed.”
Sanlúcar de Barrameda: Sonata pintoresca para piano, Op. 24
Sanlúcar de Barrameda is a popular seaside resort at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on the Mediterranean, about 30 miles downstream from Seville. Turina was familiar with the small town and premiered his Sonata pintoresca there in the summer of 1922. The work is arguably Turina’s masterpiece for solo piano, a perfect reconciliation of Andalusian atmosphere and imagery with traditional formal procedures. Like of most of the composer’s multi-movement works, Sanlúcar de Barrameda employs cyclical form, in which themes are reworked from movement to movement. This stylistic tendency was a hallmark of most composers who trained at the Parisian Schola Cantorum, a characteristic Turina’s music shares with that of Vincent d’Indy, Guillaume Lekeu, Ernest Chausson, and many others.
The first movement, “En la torre del Castillo” (In the Castle Tower), is a traditional sonata form, which lays out much of the thematic material for the entire work. The second movement, “Siluetas de la Calzada” (Silhouettes on the Promenade) is sparkling scherzo, which quotes a processional theme from the first movement as its contrasting middle section. Sanlúcar de Barrameda is noted for its beautiful beach, immortalized in the sonata’s brooding third movement, “La playa” (The Beach). The writing here is particularly impressionistic in its evocation of oceanic imagery, and at the end, sweeping arpeggios form a link with the final movement. “Los pescadores en Bajo de Guía” (The Fishermen in Bajo de Guía), an allusion to Sanlúcar’s fishing district, opens with a strict fugal exposition. Throughout the movement, various restatements of the initial theme recur as old-fashioned fugatos. Some of the contrasting episodes recall material from previous movements, but perhaps the most memorable bears an uncanny resemblance to Gershwin’s “I’ve got rhythm!”
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