The young Manuel de Falla, who had left Spain for Paris to further his studies and career, once called at the house of the French composer he most admired, Claude Debussy. It was a sunny day, so Debussy and his companions were eating in the garden. The reserved Spaniard was met at the door by a servant, who showed him into a dark waiting room. No-one came to get him, and he was too shy to announce himself again. In the Falla/Debussy relationship is symbolised the rediscovery of the greatness of Spanish music. Falla had to come to Paris to become the greatest modern Spanish composer, and it was partly Debussy who showed him the way. Falla thought Debussy’s piano piece Soirée dans Grenade (Evening in Granada) showed a complete insight into the essence of Spanish music, and when Debussy died in 1918, Falla quoted from it in his memorial piece for guitar, Homenaje (Pour le tombeau de Claude Debussy). Debussy had also composed Ibéria, an orchestral piece that completely avoids the clichés of picture-postcard Spain, yet his direct experience of Spain remained limited to a day spent in the Basque country at San Sebastian, just over the French border.
The border between France and Spain has been – perhaps still is – a mental as well as a physical frontier. The end of the Franco regime, European unity, World Expo in Seville, Olympic Games in Barcelona – all these have been clearing some of the mystery from Spain, without making it less fascinating. Yet even as a tourist destination, Spain still carries a qualitative difference from other parts of Europe. Death in the Afternoon, the melancholy celebration of the bullfight in Hemingway’s novel with that title or in Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, brings a strong sense of that difference. Also it connects us, consciously or unconsciously, to great antiquity, a pre-Christian ritual.
Travelling in Spain means travelling in time as well as in space. After the great years of world conquest, from the discoveries of Columbus to the Armada, Spain’s amazing 16th century, there was gradual decline and retreat behind the barriers of the Pyrenees – a society largely frozen in its ways, dominated by Counter-Reformation Catholicism and a near-feudal structure of authority. Spain, politically, was often described as the sick man of Europe. The Enlightenment never really took a hold there. Especially after the 1789 French Revolution, whose wars were partly fought on Spanish soil (as some Australian place names from circa 1800 remind us), a curtain of stagnation partly veiled Spain from the sight of the rest of Europe. To visit it was to re-enter a world others had lost, and one of distinctive colour, passion, and contrasts:
Abrupt as when there’s slid
Its stiff gold blazing pall
From some black coffin-lid.*
Among the riches of Spain, its music was a cultural export which, even more than the paintings of El Greco, Velasquez, Murillo or Goya, could give a foreigner a whiff, a tantalising foretaste, of going there. The imaginative musical tourist can deepen an already acquired love of the music by visiting the places where it was conceived. And surprises abound. An hour or so inland from Barcelona, you can take the telepherique to the Monastery of Montserrat, set on the barren peaks which surrounded the setting of Wagner’s Parsifal. At Easter time, the mountain is swarming with tourists – not ordinary tourists, but mostly pilgrims – come to venerate the image of the Black Virgin of Montserrat. The Easter liturgy is sung by the Escolania, the choir of boys and men which has been in continuous existence since the 12th century. As they sing, a continuous stream of pilgrims files past the image, kissing the hand of the Baby Jesus, carved in stone. The music is often from one of the 16th century masters of Spanish vocal polyphony, such as Tomás Luis de Victoria. Much of this music was composed in Rome, in the age when Spaniards provided the church not only with its shock troops, the Jesuits of Ignatius Loyola, but with some of its greatest musicians as well. This music has a passionate intensity and colour which set it apart from Palestrina’s, although the idiom is the same.
Or in Seville, also in Holy Week, you could feel almost lost in the vast interior of the Cathedral, the largest in Gothic Christendom, sitting near the statue of the four Kings of Spain carrying the coffin of Christopher Columbus, while a choir and orchestra perform a Miserere by a composer from 1830s Seville. What kind of music? Not unlike that of an opera by Donizetti: 19th-century Spain, musically, became a province of the dominant Mediterranean style, that of Italian opera. But there is something very Spanish, too, when two boys, niños tiplos (trebles), scream a duet like two young cats, and the congregation, like an excitable opera audience, burst into wild applause!
Now we are in Andalusia, the South with its Moorish survivals and its Gypsies. A side trip will take us through the mountains to Granada, where we can relive the last sigh of the Moor, the breathtaking view of the city, dominated by the Alhambra Palace on the hill, against the pink-white background of the Sierra Nevada in Spring, fruit trees blossoming along the snow line. This is the country of Federico García Lorca, the poetic interpreter of the cante jondo, the ‘deep song’ of the Gypsies. Here Manuel de Falla lived, in the shadow of the Alhambra, and worked on El amor brujo (Love, the Magician), a story of the Gypsies who live in caves on the Albaicín, the Sacro Monte. You can visit the caves to attend flamenco performances, wondering how authentic they are, when knowledgeable locals will tell you that the best flamenco nowadays is to be found in the night clubs of Madrid, where the money is better.
Climb the hill to the Alhambra, the Moorish palace, with its delicate traceries in stone, its courtyards and fountains. The fountains, especially those across the valley in the Generalife, bring memories of Falla’s masterpiece of impressionism, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. One of Falla’s inspirations was the paintings of his friend Santiago Rusiñol, who also fixed in paint the gardens of Aranjuez. Mere mention of this palace calls up the greatest hit of modern Spanish concert music, the guitar concerto of the blind Rodrigo.
This music evokes a very different part of Spain’s cultural heritage, the Bourbon court of the 18th century. For this, we have to take the train from Madrid towards Toledo. Aranjuez is a graceful palace in orange terracotta, set in landscaped gardens on the model of Versailles, even down to a Spanish Petit Trianon, the Casa del Labrador (a house for aristocrats wanting to play at being farmers). But Rodrigo was not celebrating the place so much as the music which was heard there, under the ceilings painted by Mengs, who influenced Goya: harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, themselves often evoking the textures of guitar music, and, a little later, cello concertos by another expatriate Italian virtuoso, Boccherini.
Returning to Madrid, and leaving the city for the suburbs of huge apartment blocks ringing this fast-growing capital, it takes an effort of imagination to visualise the parties of majas and majos on the riverbanks, the gilded youth of 18th-century Madrid, immortalised in Goya’s paintings, and celebrated a century later by the Catalan Enrique Granados, in his piano pieces and opera Goyescas. Even in this elegant 18th century art there are reminders of the spectres of Spanish life – the night phantoms of Goya’s etchings are suggested in a bizarre string quintet by Boccherini, The Night Music of the Streets of Madrid.
Another day trip will take you to the Escorial, the massive palace of the king who sent the Armada, Phillip II. Here the building is what is so striking – its windows without ‘eyebrows’ anticipate modernism, suggesting, in architect Le Corbusier’s opinion, a sawn-off skyscraper. Incongruous, in this palace built on a gridiron plan to recall the martyrdom of St. Laurence, to find in the chapel a pair of organs facing each other across the nave, on which the courtly, galant music by Padre Antonio Soler was first heard, in the 18th century.
A country of riches, largely from its American colonies, Spain could afford to import the best music and composers. It takes a search to discover the most intriguing illustration of this. Cadiz is a sea port on the south-eastern tip of Spain, famous in the raiding exploits of Sir Francis Drake. Its prosperous 18th-century merchants and clergy commissioned a work in 1786 from Europe’s most famous composer, who lived in faraway Austria, Joseph Haydn. To find the place where it was first performed, you have to explore one of the narrowest streets of the town, where you will find the Holy Grotto, an underground church. Here Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross was first heard on Good Friday 1787, one orchestral movement for each word, interspersed by discourses from the Bishop. Haydn reported (though he did not go to Cadiz to hear his music performed) that when each discourse ended, ‘the Bishop left the pulpit and prostrated himself before the altar. The pause was filled by music.’
There was a long pause in the history of Spanish music between 1787 and the so-called Spanish musical Renaissance, led by Albéniz, Granados, and Falla on the eve of the 20th century. Of course music continued, with vitality in folk musics and in the characteristic light musical theatre of Spain, the zarzuela. But there are no major 19th-century Spanish composers, and the high musical culture can only be described as provincial. This mirrors Spain’s political disorganisation and decline. But it would be too simple to see the revival as a counterpart of the hope for change that reached its tragic outcome in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930, forcing creative Spaniards including Picasso, Pablo Casals, and Falla to remain in exile.
A tradition as rich as this, which surrounds Spaniard and visitor alike with living reminders, could hardly wither. Spaniards don’t need to be reminded that death and rebirth are two sides of the tragic sense of life. You don’t need to go to a bullfight to learn that. You can hear it in the music.
First published 2001 for Symphony Australia orchestral programs.
* Waring, Robert Browning