Manuel de Falla’s 1913 two act opera, La vida breve (“Life is Short”), is rarely performed today. Set in Granada, it tells the story of a young gypsy girl, Salud, who falls in love with the wealthy and seductive Paco. Despite their vow of eternal love, Paco abandons Salud to marry a woman of his own social class to whom he was already engaged. At the end of Paco’s wedding reception, he denies knowing Salud …
…the eye sees not itself, but by reflection, by some other things. -William Shakespeare Maurice Ravel was fascinated by this line from the first act of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Perhaps these words, laced with mysticism and challenging the nature of reality, are not so far off from the French symbolist aesthetic of the late nineteenth century. The line between reality and reflection blurs in Ravel’s five-movement suite for solo piano, Miroirs (“Reflections”), written …
Hector Berlioz’ 1844 Treatise on Orchestration provided all future composers with an instruction manual for the modern orchestra. The book, which remains influential, discusses the range and tone colors of the instruments. In his foreword to the updated 1904 edition, Richard Strauss wrote that Berlioz’ orchestration was “full of ingenious visions, whose realization by Richard Wagner is obvious to every connoisseur.” Nowhere does the modern orchestra spring to life with greater brilliance than in Roman …
Manuel de Falla’s ballet score, El sombrero de tres picos (“The Three-Cornered Hat”) bathes in the bright colors of a searing Iberian sun. Filled with the infectious rhythms of Spanish dance, it is music which is sultry, exotic, and at times tantalizingly mysterious. The Three-Cornered Hat was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev in 1919 and premiered the same year in London by the Ballets Russes. It expanded on de Falla’s two-scene pantomime, The Magistrate and the …
On January 22 [O.S. January 9], 1905, a date which is remembered as “Bloody Sunday,” thousands of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators marched to St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace. They intended to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. Many supported the Tsar and believed that he would help to address their economic, political, and social grievances. Assembled in the square, they sang God Save the Tsar; but a frightened Nicholas II had fled the palace. Inexplicably, …
Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez emerges from a mythic Spanish landscape. Written in 1939 in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, the Concerto conjures up ghosts from the past. At moments we can hear vague echoes of the vihuela, the 15th century predecessor of the guitar. The title pays homage to the Baroque gardens of the Palacio Real de Aranjuez south of Madrid, which served as the historic spring residence of the Spanish royal family. In …