Greatest Composers we KNOW You’ve Heard Of. . .
It would be sheer fantasy to class Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) as an obscure composer. He was wildly popular in his lifetime, and his ‘greatest hits’ like the ballets The Three-Cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos), Love, the Magician (El amor brujo), and Life is Short (La vida breve), and the luscious Nights in the Gardens of Spain, are staples of the ‘pops’ repertoire even today. His face was even on the Spanish ten-peseta banknote for many years. His music is energetic, in-your-face, fun, and charged with a thoroughly Spanish idiom – you couldn’t mistake it for any other nationality. It’s also firmly based in dance music, which is why his folk-operas (zarzuelas) are so popular. The dances tell a lot of the story in these works – if you wanted to know something about the Spanish version of witchcraft and the kind of trouble it can get you into, just listen (again) to the ‘Ritual Fire Dance’ from El amor brujo. If you want to understand the goofy scrapes of a bunch of not-too-smart yokels and the ingenious ways they get themselves out of them, the ‘Suite’ from El sombrero will tell you just about what you need to know.
DeFalla was one of the pre-eminent composers of the Spanish nationalistic revival in the early twentieth century. He was born in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain, heavily influenced by its years under the Moorish rulers, and he always retained a deep interest in its dusky, exotic, Arabic-tinged native music. Andalusia is home to flamenco, the passionate, jazz-like music for voice, guitar and dance that may have been (but probably wasn’t) brought in by the Roma (“gypsy”) people in the late Middle Ages. Its almost incredible complexity in tonality and rhythm, is a mixture of African, Middle Eastern (both Arabic and Jewish), and European elements, which takes many years to master. DeFalla and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca collaborated to produce a flamenco festival in Granada in 1922, which revived interest in the form (but also, to deFalla’s chagrin, made way for “popularized” forms that diluted the purity of the “cante jondo” – the “deep song” of the ancient traditions).
When de Falla’s family moved to Madrid in 1900 he immediately entered into the thick of the musical currents of the time and place, along with Enric Granados. He studied at the Conservatorio, winning the piano prize and composing extensively for piano with voice and other instruments. La vida breve dates from 1905: he was already experimenting with the popular zarzuela genre. When he moved to Paris in 1907 he became friends with the composers there – Ravel, Debussy, Dukas, Stravinsky, Albeniz – and Sergei Diaghilev, the Parisian impresario of the famed Ballet Russe, who produced his most famous works. When the first World War forced a return to Madrid, de Falla began to write, or revise, the works by which we know him best, retaining his Parisian connections. The Three-Cornered Hat, which began life as the ballet, The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife, was revised, and produced by Diaghilev, with set designs by Pablo Picasso.
From 1921 until the end of the Spanish Civil War, de Falla lived in Granada and reconnected with his Andalusian roots.He wrote several orchestral works, including a puppet-opera, that included the harpsichord (a nod to Wanda Landowska), in a style that owes much to Stravinsky’s neo-classism. When Francisco Franco’s Fascist government came to power in 1939, he moved to Argentina, where he died at his home in the mountains, attended by his sister, in 1946.He never married, but was always surrounded by students and admirers.His remains rest in the Cathedral at Cadiz.
