Manuel de Falla and Visions of Spanish Music

Michael Christoforidis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754631934
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351392587
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Michael Christoforidis is widely recognized as a leading expert on one of Spain's most important composers, Manuel de Falla. This volume brings together both new chapters and revised versions of previously published work, some of which is made available here in English for the first time. The introductory chapter provides a biographical outline of the composer and characterisations of both Falla and his music during his lifetime. The sections that follow explore different facets of Falla's mature works and musical identity. Part II traces the evolution of his flamenco-inspired Spanish style through contacts with Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky, while Part III explores the impact of post-World War I modernities on Falla's musical nationalism. The final part reflects on aspects of Falla's music and the politics of Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Situating his discussion of these aspects of Falla's music within a broader context, including currents in literature and the visual arts, Christoforidis provides a distinctive and original contribution to the study of Falla as well as to the wider fields of musical modernism, exoticism, and music and politics.

Part I
Prelude

1 Images of a life

Like other great composers … [Manuel de] Falla is short in stature. His appearance is one hundred percent Andalusian, and seems to have been taken directly from a portrait by El Greco. High forehead, dark eyes, straight nose, small mouth, an ascetic, and at the same time passionate, expression, a face which resembles that of a farmer and an old monk, an extraordinary noble manner, and a sweet voice with an incurably Spanish accent, which makes it even more unique: these are the physical characteristics of this man, the greatest Spanish composer of today, and one of the best of any other country.¹

Alfredo Casella’s portrayal of Manuel de Falla at the height of his career exemplifies attempts by critics, colleagues and commentators to reconcile the image of the composer with the impressions evoked by his music. Throughout his creative life, Falla’s appearance was described with recourse to national stereotypes and psychological traits that complemented prevailing discussions of his music. These visual and literary representations framed the public’s awareness of the composer. This chapter provides a biographical sketch of Falla through the prism of such representations and also sheds some light on his own attempts to shape his image.

Early photographs of the composer conform with the imagery of late nineteenth-century, bourgeois portraiture: From the depiction of the baby Manuel with his nanny, “La Morilla” (see Figure 1.1) to the formal poses of the family picture.

Figure 1.1 Manuel de Falla with his wet nurse Ana “la Morilla” (c. 1878).

Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the Archivo Manuel de Falla (AMF).

More revealing are the photos of the young Manuel in his elaborate carnival costumes, which clearly denote the social standing of his family. María Martínez Sierra, author and key Falla collaborator, cast the composer’s early years within this idyllic bourgeois environment:

He spent his childhood and youth until the age of 20 nonchalantly aware that he didn’t need to think about making a living at all. He was a “young Andalusian gentleman” redeemed from the frivolity of others like him because of his love for music and his desire to make his mark on the divine art.²

This view is in part supported by Juan Viniegra, a childhood friend of similar social standing, who stressed the composer’s unexceptional beginnings:

In general, geniuses, artists and saints are presented to us as exceptional beings from their childhoods; but in all truthfulness, I can’t say that Manolito stood out from the other children of his age.

During the first period of his life, he was a normal child, who played and had a good time like the others, and enthusiastically attended the children’s parties he was invited to.³

Countering such descriptions was Falla’s own recollection of a childhood marked by self-imposed seclusion in a fantastic world of his own invention, conditions that possibly prefigured the asceticism and neuroses that would mark his later life. Leonide Massine claimed that

when Falla spoke to me of his childhood … he told me about his imaginary city, Colón, which had its own theatres, political leaders, tax collectors, newspapers and weekly magazines. Although this city existed only in his imagination, he had actually written articles intended for its newspapers. When his parents discovered this, they sent him to a doctor, for they were afraid he was suffering from delusions!⁴

Photographs of the adolescent Falla present a serious and somewhat taciturn youth who had already decided to devote his life to music. This dedication prompted Falla’s move to Madrid in the closing years of the nineteenth century to pursue his aspirations. There, he studied piano with José Tragó, who described Falla as “a very studious and conscientious boy; with a good artistic nature, for whom a gratifying future surely awaits in our difficult art form.”⁵

Following the successful completion of his exams at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid [Madrid Conservatorium] in 1899, Falla immersed himself in the world of Madrid’s género chico, the one-act zarzuelas that were the only commercially viable genre for a composer in Spain at the time. This decision was precipitated by the family’s declining fortunes in the wake of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Falla’s attempts to make a living as a género chico composer were largely unsuccessful, despite a short theatrical run of Los amores de la Inés in 1902. After this, he furthered his studies with the noted Catalan composer and musicologist Felipe Pedrell. In 1905, he made a name for himself, both as a pianist and a composer, by winning the Ortiz y Cussó piano competition and the Academia de Bellas Artes of Madrid’s prize for a one-act Spanish opera with La vida breve. One of the photographs from this time shows an urbane Falla sporting a hat and a moustache, which became a fixture till the end of World War I. His attention to grooming is evident; perhaps this was tied to his newfound success and professional standing or even to his contemporaneous infatuation with María Fiedo Ledesma, a cousin who rejected his gentlemanly advances. This portrait was also employed by Falla to satisfy the increasing demands of the press, agents and the public (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Manuel de Falla (c. 1906).

Source: Reproduced by kind permission of the AMF.

Falla’s move to Paris in 1907 entailed foregoing the status that he had begun to acquire in Madrid. Determined to further his studies in composition and expand his horizons, Falla wanted to secure a performance of La vida breve in France, for—despite assurances of a production—it had not been staged in Spain. He made ends meet by performing in various capacities, from touring with pantomime companies to accompanying instrumentalists and vocalists. Falla also gave some piano lessons and the occasional salon performance, although—like many of his fellow musicians—he expressed disdain for the lack of artistic sensibility in most Parisian salons of the time. For much of his stay in Paris, Falla’s erratic income, part of which was earmarked for his family in Madrid, imposed a frugal existence. His extant diary for 1908 bears testament to these difficult conditions and is littered with sums tallying his daily expenses.⁶ The harsh Parisian winters took their toll on Falla’s health, and he began to dream of a more idyllic future. Writing to Pedrell in 1911, Falla noted,

My health wasn’t very good either last winter. It rained terribly and consequently the humidity did me a lot of damage. As soon as I am able, I am going to divide my time between Paris and Andalusia; but I don’t envisage this happening for some time yet.⁷

The author Melchor Almagro San Martín provides a sombre description of the composer from this period of hardship:

A thin figure, with two chipped teeth, who always wore a very used, but smart, black suit, complemented by a black tie, Falla didn’t look the least bit like an extraordinary person. … He hardly spoke and when he did it was about totally uninteresting subjects, every now and then he smiled, revealing the gaps in his teeth. … He also told me of his burning desire, although he expressed it in cold words, to spend the rest of his days in a villa in Granada.⁸

In Paris, Falla had sought out the French musicians he most admired: Paul Dukas introduced Falla to Claude Debussy, and Falla met with Isaac Albéniz in the company of Joaquín Turina. Falla’s induction into the circle of the Apaches was made possible by the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, and this introduction led to friendships with Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt and Michel Dimitri Calvocoressi, who were members of this progressive group of artists. These contacts facilitated Falla’s exposure to the Parisian “avant-garde” and provided him with a supportive audience for the presentation and refinement of his music and ideas.

Falla’s Parisian associates may have also encouraged him to continue sporting a thick moustache, much like that of Viñes, during these pre-war years, while Ravel varied the configuration of his facial hair. However, in an attempt to camouflage his rapidly receding hairline, Falla also took to wearing hats in public, from straw boaters to felt bowlers. María Martínez Sierra gives the following account of another remedy employed by Falla to disguise his baldness:

Although Falla’s courtesy … had created a friendliness and intimacy between us, I felt a strange uneasiness. I don’t know what it was that told me: “There is something false about this man; something exists here which is not true.” … At that moment, a single ray of light from the setting sun entered the living room through the dirty muslins of the terrace, and shone right on the pianist’s head. The mystery was solved: the jet black hair which seemingly covered the composer’s head took on striking iridescence and the appearance of something dead. … The composer was bald and tried to hide the fact with an artificial hairpiece. Fortunately, the falseness which had troubled me was not in Falla’s soul, but in his wig, which soon disappeared. At the outset of the war in August 1914, Falla hurriedly fled Paris. In his haste to board the train, he lost his wig. And thus, he arrived back in Spain openly displaying his vast ivory-like bald patch, which further accentuated his ascetic character.⁹

Falla rarely sported his “superb wig” after returning to Madrid in 1914.¹⁰ This may have been due to the greater sense of self-confidence he had acquired over the years or the fact that his receding hairline had already formed part of his image in Spain prior to 1907.

It was through the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of examples
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Prelude
• Part II Parisian encounters and Andalusian echoes
• Part III The Hispanic modernist
• Part IV In search of Atlantis
• General bibliography
• Index