ARANJUEZ ON HIS MIND
"After listening to it for a couple of weeks,... I couldn't get it out of my mind."1 So said Miles Davis about his first encounter with Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, after hearing a recording of it in 1959 at a friend's Los Angeles home. He and his collaborator Gil Evans were immediately inspired to arrange the middle movement as the centerpiece of their 1960 album Sketches of Spain. Soon, the entire world would not be able to get this work out of its mind, as a direct result of Miles's new creation. Rodrigo's sudden meteoric rise to global celebrity—or least his famous melody's rise—is the starting point of this narrative, as it continues to cast a long shadow over one of the most remarkable careers in music history.
The Spanish composer himself had very mixed feelings about this interpretation of his concerto, especially since neither Davis nor Evans bothered to consult with him about their work or get his permission to use the melody, though he did benefit from the substantial royalties that the recording generated.2 The truth is that, as some have noted, "Davis and Evans's Concierto is likely to be heard by listeners who know it best as a medley of disparate pieces bounded by Rodrigo's melody."3 Consequently, several critics took an initially dim view of the experimental transformation of a guitar concerto into a work for a large jazz orchestra and solo trumpet.4 Scathing reviews dismissed the reinterpretation as "a curiosity and a failure," "a boring re-write," and "a strange miscalculation."5
The fact remains, however, that it won the Grammy for Best Original Jazz Composition in 1961; however, therein lies the rub. It was by no means completely original! In fact, without Rodrigo's melody, in addition to excerpts from Manuel de Falla's 1915 ballet, El amor britjo, the album would never have been possible. But there is no denying the fact that Sketches of Spain vaulted both Miles Davis and the Concierto de Aranjuez to a new level of fame and fortune, and the album's continued availability on Amazon, Spotify, and iTunes provides evidence of its enduring popularity.6
Indeed, few classical melodies have "gone viral" the way Rodrigo's middle-movement theme has. This music became the inspiration for other popularizing arrangements, by Chick Corea as well as by Richard Anthony, who used it as the basis for the popular love song Aranjuez mon amour, with lyrics by Guy Bontempelli.7 Brian May, lead guitarist of the rock group Queen, has rendered the middle movement in a remarkably expressive way (available on YouTube). Choreographer Pilar Lopez turned it into a ballet, and it appeared in Kenji Kawai's soundtrack for the 2004 Japanese manga film Ghost in the Shell: Innocence. In the 2006 animated feature Happy Feet, the penguin Mumble ascends a hill of snow and belts out a spirited rendition of "I Did It My Way," but preceded by a ten-second allusion to the opening measures of the famous movement.8 Another film in which the middle movement is not only featured but also identified is the 1996 British hit feature Brassed Off, in which the linguistically challenged conductor introduces it to his brass band as "Rodrigo's Concierto de Orange Juice"! Over time, this memorable melody became a musical symbol of European luxury and sophistication, used in ads for the Honda Rafaga and Verso automobiles in Japan as well as for the Cordoba in America. This latter commercial from the 1970s featured Ricardo Montalban as the pitchman and Angel Romero playing an abbreviated arrangement of the concerto's middle movement. In short, Rodrigo's Aranfuez is more than merely "popular." It has become a durable staple of mass culture and commerce.
THE PERILS OF POPULARITY
During an 1897 stay at a hotel in Prague, where his opera Pepita Jiménez was being produced, Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) wrote in his own journal of hearing an organ grinder outside his window playing the "religious march" from the second act of Lohengrin. With a discernible trace of envy, he exclaimed, "Oh la popularidad." Certainly Albéniz had not yet achieved "organ grinder" levels of popularity, but his so-called "Leyenda" would one day become the basis for a hit rock song in 1968, "Spanish Caravan," by The Doors.9 By then, of course, Albéniz had been dead for fifty-nine years. Had he lived long enough he might well have had reason to regret the popularity of that piece. For, an enduring presence in the realm of mass culture is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it satisfies a very human need for acceptance and acknowledgement, and it can be remunerative. On the other hand, however, the enormous success of one work can eclipse much or most of a composer's other music. Federico Moreno Torroba was grateful for the tremendous popularity of his 1932 zarzuela (operetta) Luisa Fernanda, but he always regretted that its celebrity detracted from the reputation of his other "daughters," like La Chulapona (1934) and Monte Carmelo (1939), which he thought to be as good or better than Luisa Fernanda.10
At least in the case of Luisa Fernanda there is a high probability that the public it has consistently enchanted since its premiere has also known who composed it. In the case of Albéniz's "Leyenda," it is far less likely that the young people who first heard Spanish Caravan in 1968 had any idea of or interest in where the melodic ideas originally came from. The Doors were less than helpful in this regard. Alas, this is also the case with Rodrigo in relation to the popular evocations of his Aranjuez theme, which has more often than not been quoted without attribution. A 2019 documentary film, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, features long stretches of the jazz musicians interpretation of the Adagio movement as a musical backdrop to characteristically Spanish sequences, particularly of bullfighting, but without so much as passing mention of Rodrigo's name, even in the credits. Sic transit gloria mundi.
And the curse of its popularity has, as with Albéniz, tended to obscure not only the large number of other pieces he composed but also the fact that he had a wide stylistic range and was quite capable of composing music beyond the Spanish-nationalist pale with which audiences and critics alike reflexively associate him. Though Rodrigo grew up to become a prolific composer of a wide variety of works for various media—choral, orchestral, chamber, solo piano, and voice as well as for the stage and even film—it is this concerto that has gained the most traction with musicians and concertgoers alike.
A COMPOSER OF MANY FACETS
In fact, the great challenge one faces in surveying the works of Joaquín Rodrigo lies in the sheer quantity of pieces he composed and the enormous variety of media, genres, and styles that they encompass. The unfortunate irony of Rodrigo's career and enduring reputation is that this magnificently prolific and versatile composer is known to the music world almost exclusively for a small handful of works, principally guitar concertos, and king among those, the Concierto de Aranjuez. The renown these compositions enjoy is well deserved, and my purpose here is not to suggest otherwise, to question the collective taste of his legions of admirers.
Rather, it is we ourselves we seek to benefit here, not the composer. For we deprive ourselves of rare pleasure and inspiration by remaining blind, so to speak, to so many works that may not remind us of the Aranjuez but nonetheless exhibit the same passionate embrace of life in all its diverse expressions, the same technical resourcefulness and stylistic originality, that one savors in his better-known masterpieces. And yet, the ineluctable fact remains that this is a Herculean task and one not easily completed. We need an effective strategy for approaching and comprehending such an enormous mass of material.
The customary approach would be to break his oeuvre into genres: concertos, tone poems, chamber music, songs, etc. Another might be to organize it by media: orchestra, chorus, solo vocal, guitar, and so on. Yet another would be to arrange the works in chronological order, in order to trace the evolution of his style over time and to integrate musical analysis into the biographical narrative. Of course, some combination of genre, media, and chronology might suffice.
After due reflection, however, it seems that to go about one's work along any of these lines would be to treat Rodrigo's creative output in a formulaic way that says nothing more about him than it would about any other composer, in any other place or time. No, there has to be a way to map this terrain that speaks to his singularity as a creative figure, that highlights the multiple facets of his distinctive musical personality And it bears repetition that his imagination was ignited by a whole plethora of stimuli despite a crippling disability that would have deterred many another creative artist from attempting what he brilliantly achieved. This is an additional irony in his life story, that blindness appears to have been not a hindrance but a rather a spur to his vast and multifaceted output.
One effective way would be to look at Rodrigo's music through multiple lenses, including literary, folkloric, virtuosic, sacred, historical, theatrical, and descriptive. To be sure, there is considerable overlap between these areas, and a piece that we include under, say, "virtuosic" may well have folkloric and descriptive characteristics as well. The Concierto de Aranjuez is one such example. I treat the works discussed below under their various rubrics according to what I view as their dominant aesthetic quality. In terms of chronological order, there is a somewhat synchronic character to the composers musical corpus, whereby he wrote in a variety of styles at the same time, making the establishment of a stylistic teleology not only difficult but somewhat misleading. The traditional "early—middle—late" treatment is neither relevant nor useful in Rodrigo's case. Thus, I do not shrink from including a work from the 1930s with one from the 1960s under the same heading. There are persistent traits in Rodrigo's musical personality that did not change significantly over time.
Rodrigo and Literature
Rodrigo was a great lover of literature.11 He read widely and had a large library. Fortunately there were many classics available in Braille, but he could also depend on friends and family to read to him. Thus, it comes as no surprise that he wrote numerous vocal works inspired by and utilizing a variety of texts, especially those with an Iberian pedigree. Rodrigo was attracted both to the classics from Spain's Siglo de Oro and to writings by contemporary authors. Ausencias de Dulcinea is a setting of a poem from Cervantes's Don Quijote, while song sets such as Dos poemas de Juan Ramon Jiménez reveal a fine sensitivity to modern literature.
The cantata Musica para un códice salmantino utilizes a poetic homage by Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) to the Universidad de Salamanca, with which the renowned philosopher was long affiliated. Unamuno's Ode to Salamanca extols the cultural riches and enchanting environs of Salamanca, home to a university that celebrated its 700th anniversary in the year that this work was composed, 1953. Another Generation of 1898 author aroused Rodrigo's musical interest, resulting in the exquisite collection of ten songs entitled Con Antonio Machado.
Rodrigo took a passionate interest in his wife's ancestral culture, as well as the indelible imprint that Jews made on Spanish music and literature before the Expulsion in 1492. This fascination found memorable expression in the Cuatro canciones sefardíes. Another interesting deviation from Castilian texts is the Cuatre cançons en llengua catalana. These works bear witness to Rodrigo's embrace of Spain in its entirety, both in time and space. The same is true of his use of folklore.
Rodrigo and Folklore
Though Spain is usually reduced in the popular imagination to flamenco—strumming guitars, polka-dotted skirts, and a lot of furious footwork—in fact it is a large nation of many regions, each with its own distinctive traditions in music, dance, costume, and language. Spanish composers from the Renaissance onward have had at their disposal an inexhaustible well of traditional and popular music from which to draw ideas. Luys de Narváez (1490-1547) composed a famous set of variations for vihuela on the popular melody Guárdame la vacas, while Caspar Sanz (1640-1710) composed effective dances for the guitar, especially canarios. Antonio Soler (1729-83) wrote keyboard pieces that sometimes evoke the fandango. In the nineteenth century, there was an explosion of guitar and keyboard music inspired by folklore, culminating in the nationalist piano works by Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados (1867-1916). The heritage they exalted in Iberia and Goyescas continued to inspire their successors, especially Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), Joaquín Turina (1882-1949), and Rodrigo (1901-99). However, whereas Albéniz, Falla, and Turina were strongly attracted to flamenco, Granados was more focused on Castile in the time of Goya. Rodrigo, however, stands out as a composer whose works embrace folkloric traditions from the entire peninsula, from the Concierto andaluz to the Set cançons valencianes, from the aforementioned Cuatre cançons en llengua catalana to the Sonatas de Costilla con toccata a modo de pregón. Many other works that he composed at his Braille machine, such as the Doce condones populates españolas, Tres danzas de España, and Palillos y panderetas, provide further evidence of his unending absorption in the multifarious melodies, rhythms, and instruments of Spain's many regions. Despite the rise of the international avant-garde in Spain and the Generation of 1951, Rodrigo and his friend Torroba remained steadfast in their devotion to the tradition of their nationalist predecessors, giving rise in particular to a florescence of music for the guitar, that quintessentially Spanish instrument.
Rodrigo and Virtuosity
Rodrigo was himself an accomplished pianist, and he married a woman who was at least as good as he was. Not surprisingly, then, there is a conspicuous vein of technical virtuosity in many of his works, particularly his concertos. Like many composers before him, including Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt, he could be merciless in the demands he made on the performer if the musical message he sought to convey required it. Though he did not resort to pointless virtuosity for its own sake, he was not unaware of how hard some of his music could be to play. We can see this fact on display in a telling exchange with guitarist Pepe Romero regarding the Concierto para una fiesta, composed for and premiered by Pepe:
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