Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)

The publicity for the concert performances of Falla’s opera La vida breve in the 1997 Festival of Sydney makes much of the participation of a flamenco singer and a flamenco dance company. This is the major event celebrating Falla as a composer ‘whose works have become the essence of our idea of Spanish music’. Dances and flamenco singing are indeed among the memorable features of La vida breve, and are the parts most often heard as excerpts. On the other hand, there may be no great loss in the opera’s presentation in concert, because even though it is billed as 'dramatic', it is this opera’s handling of the drama that is least convincing. 

La vida breve was composed by Manuel de Falla in 1905 as his entry in a competition for one-act operas, the King and Queen of Spain donating more than half the prize money. Falla’s winning entry had to wait until 1914 for its Spanish premiere in Madrid, having meanwhile been successfully given, in French, in Nice (1913) and at the Opéra-Comique in Paris (January 1914). Falla had to leave Spain to discover himself (his entering the competition was motivated by the need for money to travel); he had to wait until he was discovered by perceptive French musicians before doors opened to him in Spain. Even then, his opera did not displace the more popular zarzuelas from Spain’s musical theatres. Falla’s most characteristic music was to take other forms: ballet, music theatre, and eventually the unfinished epic L'Atlantida, which he called a ‘scenic cantata’.

There is another curious aspect of La vida breve proving, if proof were needed, that authenticity of ethnic and local reference comes from creative intuition rather than direct experience: La vida breve is set in Granada, the Andalusian city where Falla settled in 1920. But he composed the opera before he had ever visited that city (the same is true of the other work on the 1997 Sydney program, the ‘Symphonic impressions’ for piano and orchestra, Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916), which contains a wonderful evocation of the Generalife, the garden on the hill behind Granada’s Alhambra Palace.) 

Being Andalusian, Falla had no difficulty in imagining the atmosphere of Granada. When his opera was performed in France, however, he went to great pains to avoid revealing that he had never been there, lest the French be disillusioned. This gives a clue to the operatic milieu in which La vida breve was created: this was the heyday of verismo, and the Spanish competition Falla entered was almost certainly suggested by a similar one sponsored by the Italian publisher Sonzogno in 1888, and won by Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana. It cannot be proved that Falla knew Charpentier’s opera Louise of 1900, but there are strong parallels between the urban setting in Paris of its up-to-date love story, and the Granadine background in La vida breve, where the intermezzo is played in front of a drop curtain painted with a panorama of Granada from the Sacromonte, the hill on which nestles the Albaicín, the gypsy quarter where the story is set. 

The author of the libretto of La vida breve, Carlos Fernández Shaw, was a successful writer of texts for zarzuelas, a specifically Spanish genre of light opera with spoken dialogue (Falla himself had already composed at least three zarzuelas, without any great success). Falla noticed in the review Blanco y Negro some verses by Shaw, and these became the germinal idea for La vida breve. Shaw, like Falla, was from Cadiz, and the two men, who had known each other for years, had already decided on the title, which means ‘The Short Life’. They began work on the opera before the competition was announced. Given this background, it is hard to explain why Shaw’s libretto is so sketchy. The drama has been called, not unfairly, a pointless hard luck story, and even so sympathetic a student of Falla as Ronald Crichton admits that Shaw’s tragedy ‘moves to the arbitrary end in a series of spurts against a background of the sights and sounds of Granada’.

Winning the competition did not guarantee any performance. This was frustrating for Falla, but perhaps just as well, since France was better placed to appreciate what he had achieved in La vida breve. The opera became his most effective visiting card in Parisian musical circles. Dukas heard Falla play through the score and exclaimed ‘That's worth doing at the Opéra-Comique’. Dukas introduced Falla to other composers and musicians, including Debussy and Ravel. These men recognised their ‘impressionism’ in aspects of Spanish folk music. They saw past the things in Falla’s opera reflecting the Spaniard’s hankering after French good taste and formal perfection. Spanish music had been deeply influenced by the ‘Spanishry’ of Massenet (Le Cid), Bizet (Carmen), Chabrier (España) and Lalo (Symphonie espagnole). This ‘Spain-in-music' left small traces even in La vida breve, but the French avant-garde was already transcending it. On first meeting Debussy, the shy Falla said ‘I have always loved French music’, to which Debussy replied ‘I never have!’ The critic Pierre Lalo, reviewing the Paris production of La vida breve, commented, ‘The best of the work is found in its picturesque quality, and this is not made up of separate pieces, but is rather to be regarded as the essence of the work: throughout the work an impression of the land of Spain, a feeling of the countryside, the sky, the day, the moment, surrounds the characters and the action, with their subtle atmosphere; the picturesque is subtly linked with the development of the drama... The most felicitous passage is that at the end of the first scene which describes twilight in Granada – a page of penetrating poetry which preserves, in its sensitivity and melancholy accent, something intimate and concentrated’. 

As he evoked the Andalusian background of his opera Falla achieved (writes Gilbert Chase in The Music of Spain) a higher degree of artistry and ethnic authenticity than is to be found in any previous Spanish lyric drama. This is what really sets La vida breve apart from the zarzuela genre, which failed to achieve a universal style and technique. This was also the sense in which it was necessary for Falla to go to France to discover himself, and to consolidate his awareness of what he had achieved; he used to say, ‘I feel like a Spaniard when I’m abroad and like a foreigner when I’m in Spain’. We’ll never know how much of the final polish of his opera was due to the revisions Falla made in preparation for the French performances. It was the translator into French, Paul Milliet, who advised Falla to expand La vida breve into two acts, though Falla claimed that the expansion of the interlude between the two scenes and the dance in the last scene were made solely for the convenience of scene changing. It was Debussy who suggested shortening the curses, the grandmother’s and uncle Sarvaor’s, making the opera’s ending even more abrupt than it might have been.

There is little dramatic action in the plot, which can be briefly summarised: Salud, a young girl of Granada, is deserted by Paco, who had sworn eternal love to her. Paco is going to marry his new love, Carmela, but in the middle of the wedding feast Salud enters, reproaches Paco and falls dead at his feet. Jaime Pahissa points out that until Falla saw the opera performed, he had not realised that Salud would be presented as a gypsy. Pedro Morales, an Andalusian who had lived in London all his life, suggested that Salud, suffering passively when betrayed, is a truer type of Spanish womanhood than the self-sufficient, iron-willed heroine of Bizet’s Carmen – commenting on this Falla pointed out that Carmen is a gypsy, whereas Salud is not. The confusion arises because gypsy characteristics are taken to be Andalusian, and the term Andalusian to mean gypsy.

It would be pointless to look in La vida breve for results of Falla’s later intensive study of the cante jondo, the ‘deep song’ of Andalusia, and of Andalusian gypsies in particular (today the most authentic Andalusian song and dance is found, they say, not in Granada but in Madrid, where the money is better for performers). Falla was entering the world of Granada through imagination. There is no copying of actual folksong in La vida breve, rather Falla’s music shows the first signs of his whole musical style being impregnated by the essence of folk idioms. Falla’s confidence in moving along this path was greatly reinforced by his teacher in Madrid, the composer and folksong collector Felipe Pedrell, who probably also introduced him to recent developments in French and Russian music, as well as to the full range of Spanish folksong. In La vida breve the most obvious folk-related elements and local colour are in the songs and dances of the wedding festivities of Paco and Carmela. They accentuate the dramatic irony as backdrop for Salud’s falling apart – but fatalism is the dominant atmosphere of the opera, making Salud’s disintegration at least partly plausible. Shaw gave Falla the original impulse for the opera in poetry heard in the first scene from voices in the forge, lamenting the lot of those born to be anvils rather than hammers.

How are the ‘flamenco’ elements integrated into the opera as a whole? In recent years, Spanish performances and recordings of Falla’s works have sought ethnological accuracy for the folk-based elements, introducing the music of real gypsy cantaors in El amor brujo and La vida breve. The reasoning is well set out by Eduardo Mata, conductor of one such recording of La vida breve, made in Venezuela: he points out that Flamenco, or cante jondo is fundamentally an improvisatory art, judged by the ‘duende’ of the interpreters: a combination of charisma, inspiration and a certain magical element – it is a style which cannot be written down. Falla wrote the cante jondo line with a simple accompaniment, in such a way that the singer and the guitarists need only to be able to read music, thus guaranteeing the possibility of universal performance. This ‘translation’ by Falla reflects the performing practices of his period, but leaves little room for the spontaneity inherent in authentic flamenco. Mata’s justification for letting his Flamenco group improvise is that this preserves the integrity and dramatic effect of the cante jondo.

No doubt this will also happen in the Sydney performances, but it has a possibly disruptive effect, that of accentuating the contrast, in La vida breve, between the extremes characterised (by comédienne Anna Russell) as ‘Spanish rude’ and ‘Spanish polite’. Gilbert Chase felt that Falla had not completely solved the problem of finding a characteristically Spanish declamation and melody for the more lyrical and dramatic situations of the opera, such as the love duet between Salud and Paco, in which he has recourse ‘to a more or less conventional idiom reminiscent of Massenet’. This may be a little harsh because Falla has succeeded in keeping Salud’s music, whether in a Spanish idiom or not, appealing and dignified, never allowing the self-pity to become maudlin. The role of Salud responds best to the poise and beauty of sound of an interpreter like Victoria de los Angeles, whose recordings did so much to spread the fame of La vida breve. It is just as well that Salud is so convincing, for her character is the only one drawn in any depth: in suggesting her desperation and outraged dignity, Falla’s force of musical personality triumphs over the opera’s eclecticism of style and skimpy dramatic structure. The mature Falla begins to emerge from the chrysalis of what one student of his work termed pre-Manuel de ante-Falla. La vida breve is Falla’s first major achievement, and its qualities go beyond Andalusian, flamenco aspects, attractive and necessary though these are.

First published in Opera~Opera, 1997