On the stage step forth two figures: the lamp-glare sharpens and deforms them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a guitar. A woman, slender and tall: her black mantón is like a subtle fur over the angular brightness of her shoulders. She wears a large sombrero ancho, black as the two black eyes in her white face.
They stand within the night, within the crowd. The man takes a chair: the woman remains isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises. Under the laced clamor of the crowd she sings unheard—under the silent night....
A note, hard like silver, high and sharp as an arrow, rises above the clamor and is heard. Far up, it soars, surrounded by the stars. It falls. And as it falls, reaching the crowd, it links itself within the vast confusion. This rough-hewn Spain falls along with the note: is drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into rest, within an utter silence.
The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur like a breeze: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music has conquered: it is the night’s silence, speaking; the night’s quiet, moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.
Burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship—Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstasy of an ideal—Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting—Arab. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, this Andalusian song of many wills becomes the drama of Spain.
The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring and the crowd move than this plastic fixity of dance. Torment, passion, vision, ruthlessly compress in a thin body.
The music cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they become the skeletal arabesque which is the backbone of the Spanish music. All the voices of Spain’s world are laced. The Jew’s sensual mysticism, conflict between his homely passions and his cosmic fate, rises in a line more Arabic than Jewish. And the tendency of the music to transcend its scale is Byzantine; it bespeaks the North African shores of Porphyry and Plotinus, of Origen and Augustine. But the stress is more barbarous than platonic. And the form is forever Spain. Its elements do not suffice to make this music great. It is greatly moving, because its moving parts become articulate, not in moments, not progressively, but all at once: in restraint, in defeat—in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.
The passion does not depart; a woman’s body holds it and we are moved not by the passion but by the unmoved victory over passion. This cadence is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her. This peal is pathos. The high head, the arms crushing the breast, the torrent of heel-notes rivet a triumph over pathos. The mouth sings languorous desire; but the body is hard. Sudden the song flares like a vision from that mouth. But the body circles the stage in a crisp gayety, the eyes smile, the knees dip in courteous bestowal.
At the other end of Córdoba, the night lives among the columns of the Mosque. With arched head and heel of arabesque, they dance their mystery—a forest of willful movement under the will-less stars. This woman is a column too; rigid, and stone-like and adance. But the dance of the Arab columns is horizontal; it is an easeful running with the earth. The dance of this woman which is a dance of Spain, is deep and is high. It is not horizontal. So calm, it touches hell. So still, it reaches God.