Cosette Justo Valdés, conductor

MANUEL DE FALLA
NOCHES EN LOS JARDINS DE ESPAÑA                                                                 
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF SPAIN
1876-1946

While composers of all periods of Western music have at times made use of popular or folk tunes in their music, the Spaniards seemed obsessed with the practice. The Italian import keyboard composer, Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1750), set the fashion for incorporating “street music” into his sonatas for the brilliant harpsichordist, Queen Maria Barbara. The practice continues to this day.

Born in Cadiz, Manuel de Falla received his first music lessons from his mother. He studied piano and composition in Madrid, where he became interested in Spanish music, especially Andalusian flamenco. But he realized early on that he was not good enough to make a career as pianist, and the symphonic institutions in Spain were too limited to make a living as a classical composer. In 1907, he left Spain in order to achieve international exposure for his music, settling in Paris where he came under the influence of Paul Dukas, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. His music, however, even during the height of the French influence, remained solidly Spanish in style. With the outbreak of World War I, he returned to his native country.

A deeply religious – almost fanatic – Catholic, de Falla expressed his faith in a magnum opus, Atlántida, an epic based on what he regarded as the holy mission of his boyhood hero Christopher Columbus. The cantata, in which the Spanish nation, rising from the ruins of Atlantis, goes forth under the banner of Christ to the New World, remained incomplete at de Falla’s death. He actually submitted parts of it to Church authorities for approval.

De Falla began Noches en los Jardins de España in 1909 in Paris as a set of three nocturnes for piano. But friends, and especially the pianist Ricardo Viñes, advised him to transform it into a work for piano and orchestra. Instead, the composer put the work aside and did not return to it until 1915, after his return to Spain. He described the work as “Symphonic impressions,” insisting that it was not a piano concerto, and that the piano was an integral part of the orchestral fabric. Originally de Falla planned a fourth movement, based on a tango rhythm, but that movement ended up as the “Pantomime” movement of El amor brujo.

Nights is a purely atmospheric work, at times almost hypnotic in its simple melodies and understated orchestration. The first movement En el Generalife, describes the famous Palace garden of the Generalife (from the Arabic Jannat al-‘Arif – Architect’s Garden) on the Alhambra hill in Granada. It opens with what sounds like an accompaniment, but is actually the main theme that recalls Debussy. The theme has a Moorish flavor, first heard as if played on a guitar; the strings imitate the strumming sound, while the piano part is often a single line avoiding chords.

In the second movement, Danza lejana (Distant Dance), once again the themes are brief and simple, the rhythm and harmonies evoking the Flamenco style. The dance gradually increases in volume and tempo before receding again into the distance. The piano leads without interruption into the third movement, En los jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba (The gardens of the Sierra Cordoba mountains). In the middle, the piano takes the role of the singer of cante jondo, a vocal Flamenco style in which a florid melody in the high treble sings over a throbbing bass. The movement begins energetically but slows to a brooding conclusion.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com

Manuel de Falla, (born November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain—died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina), was the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early 20th century. In his music, he achieved a fusion of poetry, asceticism, and ardour that represents the spirit of Spain at its purest.

Falla took piano lessons from his mother and later went to Madrid to continue studying piano under José Tragó and to study composition with Felipe Pedrell. Pedrell inspired Falla with his own enthusiasm for 16th-century Spanish church music, folk music, and native opera, or zarzuela. In 1905 Falla won two prizes, one for piano playing and the other for a national opera, La vida breve (first performed in Nice, France, 1913).

Zarazuelas are is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular songs, as well as dance.

Falla moved to Paris in 1907, where he remained for seven years. There he met a number of composers who had an influence on his style, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Paul Dukas, as well as Igor Stravinsky. From Paris, he published his first piano pieces and songs. In 1914 he returned to Madrid, where he wrote the music for a ballet, El amor brujo (Love, the Magician; Madrid, 1915), remarkable for its distillation of Andalusian folk music. Falla followed this with El corregidor y la molinera (Madrid, 1917), which Diaghilev persuaded him to rescore for a ballet by Léonide Massine called El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat; London, 1919). Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain; Madrid, 1916), a suite of three impressions for piano and orchestra, evoked the Andalusian atmosphere through erotic and suggestive orchestration. All these works established Falla internationally as the leading Spanish composer.

Falla then retired to Granada, where in 1922 he organized a cante hondo festival and composed a puppet opera, El retablo de Maese Pedro. Like the subsequent Harpsichord Concerto (1926), containing echoes of Domenico Scarlatti, the Retablo shows Falla much influenced by Igor Stravinsky. Falla’s style was then Neoclassical instead of Romantic, still essentially Spanish, but Castilian rather than Andalusian.

Also in Granada, de Falla began work on the large-scale orchestral cantata Atlàntida (Atlantis) based on the Catalan text L’Atlàntida by Jacint Verdaguer, which he considered to be the most important of all his works. Verdaguer’s text gives a mythological account of how the submersion of Atlantis created the Atlantic ocean, thus separating Spain and Latin America, and how later the Spanish discovery of America reunited what had always belonged together. De Falla continued work on the cantata after moving to Argentina in 1939. The orchestration of the piece remained incomplete at his death and was completed posthumously by Ernesto Halffter.

De Falla tried but failed to prevent the murder of his close friend the poet Federico García Lorca in 1936. Following Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, de Falla left Spain for Argentina. He died in Alta Gracia, in the Argentine province of Córdoba. In 1947 his remains were brought back to Spain and entombed in the cathedral at Cádiz. One of the lasting honors to his memory is the Manuel de Falla Chair of Music in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Complutense University of Madrid.