The Music of Spain

by Carl Van Vechten

from a photograph by Matzene

Tarquinia Tarquini as Conchita

I

Four modern operas stand out as Spanish in subject and atmosphere. I would put at the top of the list Zandonai's Conchita; the Italian composer has caught on his musical palette and transferred to his tonal canvas a deal of the lazy restless colour of the Iberian peninsula in this little master-work. The feeling of the streets and patios is admirably caught. My friend, Pitts Sanborn, said of it, after its solitary performance at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York by the Chicago Opera Company, "There is musical atmosphere of a rare and penetrating kind; there is colour used with the discretion of a master; there are intoxicating rhythms, and above the orchestra the voices are heard in a truthful musical speech.... Ever since Carmen it has been so easy to write Spanish music and achieve supremely the banal. Here there is as little of the Spanish of convention as in Debussy's Iberia, but there is Spain." This opera, based on Pierre Louÿs's sadic novel, "La Femme et le Pantin," owed some of its extraordinary impression of vitality to the vivid performance given of the title-rôle by Tarquinia Tarquini. Raoul Laparra, born in Bordeaux, but who has travelled much in Spain, has written two Spanish operas, La Habanera and La Jota, both named after popular Spanish dances and both produced at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. I have heard La Habanera there and found the composer's use of the dance as a pivot of a tragedy very convincing. Nor shall I forget the first act-close, in which a young man, seated on a wall facing the window of a house where a most bloody murder has been committed, sings a wild Spanish ditty, accompanying himself on the guitar, crossing and recrossing his legs in complete abandonment to the rhythm, while in the house rises the wild treble cry of a frightened child. I have not heard La Jota, nor have I seen the score. I do not find Emile Vuillermoz enthusiastic in his review ("S. I. M.," May 15, 1911): "Une danse transforme le premier acte en un kaléidoscope frénétique et le combat dans l'église doit donner, au second, dans l'intention de l'auteur 'une sensation à pic, un peu comme celle d'un puits où grouillerait la besogne monstreuse de larves humaines.' A vrai dire ces deux tableaux de cinématographe papillotant, corsés de cris, de hurlements et d'un nombre incalculable de coups de feu constituent pour le spectator une épreuve physiquement douloureuse, une hallucination confuse et inquiétante, un cauchemar assourdissant qui le conduisent irrésistiblement à l'hébétude et à la migraine. Dans tout cet enfer que devient la musique?" Perhaps opera-goers in general are not looking for thrills of this order; the fact remains that La Jota has had a modest career when compared with La Habanera, which has even been performed in Boston. Carmen is essentially a French opera; the leading emotions of the characters are expressed in an idiom as French as that of Gounod; yet the dances and entr'actes are Spanish in colour. The story of Carmen's entrance song is worth retelling in Mr. Philip Hale's words ("Boston Symphony Orchestra Programme Notes"; 1914-15, P. 287): "Mme. Galli-Marié disliked her entrance air, which was in 6-8 time with a chorus. She wished something more audacious, a song in which she could bring into play the whole battery of her perversités artistiques, to borrow Charles Pigot's phrase: 'caressing tones and smiles, voluptuous inflections, killing glances, disturbing gestures.' During the rehearsals Bizet made a dozen versions. The singer was satisfied only with the thirteenth, the now familiar Habanera, based on an old Spanish tune that had been used by Sebastian Yradier. This brought Bizet into trouble, for Yradier's publisher, Heugel, demanded that the indebtedness should be acknowledged in Bizet's score. Yradier made no complaint, but to avoid a lawsuit or a scandal, Bizet gave consent, and on the first page of the Habanera in the French edition of Carmen this line is engraved: 'Imitated from a Spanish song, the property of the publishers of Le Ménestrel.'"

There are other operas the scenes of which are laid in Spain. Some of them make an attempt at Spanish colouring, more do not. Massenet wrote no less than five operas on Spanish subjects, Le Cid, Chérubin, Don César de Bazán, La Navarraise and Don Quichotte (Cervantes's novel has frequently lured the composers of lyric dramas with its story; Clément et Larousse give a long list of Don Quixote operas, but they do not include one by Manuel García, which is mentioned in John Towers's compilation, "Dictionary-Catalogue of Operas." However, not a single one of these lyric dramas has held its place on the stage). The Spanish dances in Le Cid are frequently performed, although the opera is not. The most famous of the set is called simply Aragonaise; it is not a jota. Pleurez, mes yeux, the principal air of the piece, can scarcely be called Spanish. There is a delightful suggestion of the jota in La Navarraise. In Don Quichotte la belle Dulcinée sings one of her airs to her own guitar strummings, and much was made of the fact, before the original production at Monte Carlo, of Mme. Lucy Arbell's lessons on that instrument. Mary Garden, who had learned to dance for Salome, took no guitar lessons for Don Quichotte. But is not the guitar an anachronism in this opera? In a pamphlet by Don Cecilio de Roda, issued during the celebration of the tercentenary of the publication of Cervantes's romance, taking as its subject the musical references in the work, I find, "The harp was the aristocratic instrument most favoured by women and it would appear to be regarded in Don Quixote as the feminine instrument par excellence." Was the guitar as we know it in existence at that epoch? I think the vihuela was the guitar of the period.... Maurice Ravel wrote a Spanish opera, l'Heure Espagnole (one act, performed at the Paris Opéra-Comique, 1911). Octave Séré ("Musiciens français d'Aujourd'hui") says of it: "Les principaux traits de son caractère et l'influence du sol natal s'y combinent étrangement. De l'alliance de la mer et du Pays Basque (Ravel was born in the Basses-Pyrénées, near the sea) est née une musique à la fois fluide et nerveusement rythmée, mobile, chatoyante, amie du pittoresque et dont le trait net et précis est plus incisif que profond." Hugo Wolf's opera Der Corregidor is founded on the novel, "El Sombrero de tres Picos," of the Spanish writer, Pedro de Alarcón (1833-91). His unfinished opera Manuel Venegas also has a Spanish subject, suggested by Alarcón's "El Niño de la Bola." Other Spanish operas are Beethoven's Fidelio, Balfe's The Rose of Castile, Verdi's Ernani and Il Trovatore, Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Mozart's Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, Weber's Preciosa (really a play with incidental music), Dargomijsky's The Stone Guest (Pushkin's version of the Don Juan story. This opera, by the way, was one of the many retouched and completed by Rimsky-Korsakow), Reznicek's Donna Diana—and Wagner's Parsifal! The American composer John Knowles Paine's opera Azara, dealing with a Moorish subject, has, I think, never been performed.

II

The early religious composers of Spain deserve a niche all to themselves, be it ever so tiny, as in the present instance. There is, to be sure, some doubt as to whether their inspiration was entirely peninsular, or whether some of it was wafted from Flanders, and the rest gleaned in Rome, for in their service to the church most of them migrated to Italy and did their best work there. It is not the purpose of the present chronicler to devote much space to these early men, or to discuss in detail their music. There are no books in English devoted to a study of Spanish music, and few in any language, but what few exist take good care to relate at considerable length (some of them with frequent musical quotation) the state of music in Spain in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the golden period. To the reader who may wish to pursue this phase of our subject I offer a small bibliography. There is first of all A. Soubies's two volumes, "Histoire de la Musique d'Espagne," published in 1889. The second volume takes us through the eighteenth century. The religious and early secular composers are catalogued in these volumes, but there is little attempt at detail, and he is a happy composer who is awarded an entire page. Soubies does not find occasion to pause for more than a paragraph on most of his subjects. Occasionally, however, he lightens the plodding progress of the reader, as when he quotes Father Bermudo's "Declaración de Instrumentos" (1548; the 1555 edition is in the Library of Congress at Washington): "There are three kinds of instruments in music. The first are called natural; these are men, of whom the song is called musical harmony. Others are artificial and are played by the touch—such as the harp, the vihuela (the ancient guitar, which resembles the lute), and others like them; the music of these is called artificial or rhythmic. The third species is pneumatique and includes instruments such as the flute, the douçaine (a species of oboe), and the organ." There may be some to dispute this ingenious and highly original classification. The best known, and perhaps the most useful (because it is easily accessible) history of Spanish music is that written by Mariano Soriano Fuertes, in four volumes: "Historia de la Música Española desde la venida de los Fenicios hasta el año de 1850"; published in Barcelona and Madrid in 1855. There is further the "Diccionario Técnico, Histórico, y Biográfico de la Música," by José Parada y Barreto (Madrid, 1867). This, of course, is a general work on music, but Spain gets her full due. For example, a page and a half is devoted to Beethoven, and nine pages to Eslava. It is to this latter composer to whom we must turn for the most complete and important work on Spanish church music: "Lira Sacro-Hispana" (Madrid, 1869), in ten volumes, with voluminous extracts from the composers' works. This collection of Spanish church music from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth, with biographical notices of the composers is out of print and rare (there is a copy in the Congressional Library at Washington). As a complement to it I may mention Felipe Pedrell's "Hispaniae Schola Musica Sacra," begun in 1894, which has already reached the proportions of Eslava's work. Pedrell, who was the master of Enrique Granados, has also issued a fine edition of the music of Victoria.