Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
En el Generalife (In the Generalife)
Danza lejana (Dance in the Distance) –
En los jardines de la Sierra de Cordoba (In the Gardens of the Sierra of Cordova)
There is much truth in the claim that Falla had to go to Paris to complete his discovery of truly Spanish music, of which he became the greatest creator in the 20th century. The leading French musicians with whom Falla became as friendly as his reserved nature would allow included Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas. This was the age of musical impressionism, and great impressionist works about Spain had already been composed, by French composers: Debussy’s Ibéria and Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole. Both are night pieces, as though Spain comes most fully to life after sundown. Falla first conceived what became Nights in the Gardens of Spain in Paris in 1909; it was to be for solo piano, and the title was to be simply Nocturnes (echoing Debussy and Chopin). It was at the suggestion of the great Catalan pianist living in Paris, Ricardo Viñes, that Falla eventually changed his Nocturnes into an orchestral work with an important piano part, and he dedicated it to Viñes.
The title probably owes something to the fact that Falla completed the work (in 1915) while staying at Sitges, near Barcelona, in the house of the painter Rusiñol, famous for his impressions of gardens of Spain. Falla’s subtitle is ‘Symphonic impressions for piano and orchestra, in three parts’, but as is usually the case with ‘impressionist’ music, painting and literature played a larger part in the conception than the observation of nature. A poem by Francis Jammes and three from the Songs of life and hope by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario seem to have influenced Falla. Dario’s poems concerned night sounds heard in the distance, melancholy night thoughts about the passing of youth and the difference between what was and what might have been. This is the atmosphere breathed by Nights in the Gardens of Spain, ‘headily subjective’, as Ronald Crichton observes, and inevitably reminding the listener of this vein in Debussy’s music.
The picturesque evocations of Falla’s titles are thus somewhat misleading, except that two of them clearly ‘locate’ the music in the Moorish-influenced south of Spain, in Andalusia. The Moorish tracery and the play of fountains in the Generalife, the leafy summer palace on the hill opposite the Alhambra of Granada, are a setting in which Falla could have heard the typically Andalusian music which inspires his own – although it was not until a few years later that Falla was to settle in Granada, he was born in Andalusia (in Cadiz,), and had already composed that masterpiece of Andalusian music, El Amor brujo (Love, the magician). Jaime Pahissa finds in Nights in the Gardens of Spain two characteristic aspects of Andalusian music ‘for they alternate between a vague nostalgic quality and a brisk, exciting rhythm’. The work was originally to have included an extra movement based on the Cadiz form of the Tango, and its exclusion may explain why the nostalgic, reflective quality now predominates.
As in Debussy’s ‘symphonic sketches’ La Mer, so in Falla’s ‘symphonic impressions’ – the underlying structural mastery of the composer makes the music far more than a sequence of moods or a disjointed travelogue. The first part, for example, is virtually a set of continuous variations on the theme in small intervals stated by the violas playing near the bridge, and which sounds like an accompaniment, prompting one commentator to say, misleadingly, that the piece is ‘pure atmosphere’. The last movement, with evocations of gypsy cante jondo (deep song), can be considered formally either as a rondo or as couplets with a refrain.
Nights in the Gardens of Spain is not a concert piece for soloist and orchestra, but an orchestral piece in which the piano has an elaborate but still discreet solo part. It is going too far to say that the piano is merely an additional orchestral instrument, though that gets the emphasis right. If there were models for Falla’s originality of treatment, they lie not in the Romantic piano concerto but in works such as Vincent d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Song (Symphonie cévenole), with its piano first among equals and its cyclical treatment derived from Franck’s Symphonic variations. Some have heard hints, too, in Falla’s work, of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, which Falla would have heard when it was new, and which bears, in its piano part, the traces of being conceived as a concert piece for piano and orchestra. Best, though, to enjoy Nights in the Gardens of Spain as the only work of its kind. If there is a key to its longing romanticism, it is one which seems almost indecent to lay bare. Shortly after completing this work, the shy and austere Falla who had composed an impression of the gardens of the Sierra de Cordoba was recovering in a Cordoba clinic from an illness brought on, some say, by a hopeless passion for Pastora Imperio, the gypsy dancer of El Amor brujo.
First published for ABC Concerts/Symphony Australia, c.1980