The Charm of Spain (La Sal de España)
Michael Kevin Jones (cello), Agustín Maruri (guitar)
rec. October 1999, Kirtlington Park Room, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA
EMEC E034 [57:18]
The music played in the salons of pre-Romantic Spain (roughly the first two decades of the Nineteenth Century, before the emergence of what can be described as a Spanish Romantic movement) often gave prominence to instrumental arrangements of popular songs. Some of these songs were tonadillas – the word tonadilla originally referred to a song used in theatrical interludes, but by the time of the music on this disc was it was most often used to identify one-act musical works which were often satirical (of a kind which largely died out with the rise of the zarzuela in the 1630s and 1640s). Others had their origins in one or other sainete (a comedy or farce incorporating music).
This engaging CD is made up of a selection of such material, as published in collections such as La Lira d’Apollo (Madrid, 1817), edited and published by Bartolomé Wirmbs, a German living in Madrid. Wirmbs set up one of the very first music printers in Spain in 1817, based in the Calle del Turco in Madrid. He was assisted in his venture by the Real Sociedad Económica Matritense (Royal Economic Society of Madrid) and by Federico Moretti (1769-1839), a Neapolitan soldier, composer and guitarist, who had settled in Spain in 1749 and whose important handbook, Principios para Tocar la Guitarra de Seis Ôrdenes (Principles for Playing the Six String Guitar) had been published in Madrid in 1799. Wirmbs went on to produce other collections, after La Lira, including a series under the title Colección de canciones españolas, beginning in 1818. 1825 saw the publication of another important collection edited by Wirmbs, his Colección General de Canciones Españolas y Americanas.
Drawing on such collections, guitarist Agustín Maruri and cellist Michael Kevin Jones put together this thoroughly entertaining programme, played on period instruments made by two major Parisian luthiers of the age – the guitar (of 1825) being the work of René Lacote (1785-1855), while the cello of 1850 is by Jean Baptiste Vuillaume (1798-1850). Both instruments are in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is thus wholly appropriate both that the recording should have been made in that Museum and that the cover image on the CD’s booklet should reproduce a Spanish masterpiece, Goya’s painting of Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuriga which is in the collection of the Metropolitan. A glance at the track list at the close of this review will demonstrate that only one of those whose music is recorded here (Manuel Garcia) achieved anything approaching the same kind of fame as Goya; interestingly, Garcia and Goya were friends and in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston there is a Portrait of a Man by Goya, which has sometimes been identified as a portrait of Manuel Garcia, perhaps because it is known to have been owned by the composer’s son, Manuel Patricio Rodriguez Garcia (1805-1906), a world famous singing teacher and inventor of the laryngoscope.
I would hazard a guess that Garcia’s is the only name in the track list likely to be at all familiar to most, and even his fame is not primarily as a composer. Born in Seville, where as a boy he was a chorister in the Cathedral, Manuel Garcia (1775-1832) went on to become a leading lyric tenor of his age and the father of two famous mezzo-sopranos, Pauline Viardot (1821-1910) and Maria Malibran (1808-36). He was also a bigamist, the founder, in 1825, of an opera company in New York and the composer of more than 40 light operas. He is represented on this disc by ‘El polo del contrabandista’, a version of a song (‘Yo soy el contrabandista’) from his ópera-monologue (for tenor, it was premiered by Garcia himself), El poeta calculista of 1804. This song (the text of which is anonymous) appealed to the Romantics’ fascination with outsider figures such as bandits and smugglers and had an influence on a number of individual romantic artists. A striking instance can be found in George Sand’s Preface to her story Le Contrabandier (1837), where she refers to Garcia’s song, writing that the composer held “that the movement, the character, and the meaning of this musical pearl summed up the life of an artist – for which, in his words, the life of the smuggler was the ideal.” Another instance is to be found in Liszt’s Opus 5 No. 3 (composed in 1836), a ‘Rondeau fantastique sur un thème espagnole’, the thème being Garcia’s song. The song itself is a polo, a form about which Ann Livermore (A Short History of Spanish Music, New York, 1972) writes (p. 250) that it is “a quick, tense air in 3/8 rhythm [which] holds a high place in cante jondo [deep song].” Here it gets a superb reading by Jones and Maturi, full of intense feeling (within the limits of salon culture) and played in a plausibly Andalusian manner.
Though not so internationally famous as Garcia, Cristóbal Oudrid would have been a familiar name to Spanish lovers of music in the Nineteenth Century – though his greatest fame was to come with the mid-century growth of the zarzuela – of which Oudrid wrote (or part wrote) more than a hundred between 1847 and 1884. Belonging to an earlier period, his song ‘La Macarena’ (which closes this CD) was originally written for the French mezzo-soprano Constance Nantier Didiée (1831-1867) with piano accompaniment. Jones and Maruri interpret the piece with decorous vigour and warm emotion. This is, indeed, ‘Spanish charm’!
Mariano Ledesma (his full name was Mariano Rodriguez de Ledesma) was born in Zaragoza where, at the age of 8, he became a chorister in the Cathedral. The maestro di capella was then Francisco Javier García Fajer (1730-1809) who had himself studied at the same cathedral school, before spending some years in Italy, returning to Spain to take up this post in 1756. In her booklet notes Celsa Alonso tells us that “during his exile in London”, prompted, I assume, by the autocratic and anti-liberal rule of Ferdinand VII, Ledesma was “the teacher of the daughter of the Prince of Wales”. Ledesma returned to Spain in 1836 (i.e. after Ferdinand’s death in 1833), becoming maestro di capella at the Royal Chapel in Madrid. This instrumental version of his song ‘La Persuasion’, with much pleasing interplay between cello and guitar, suggests that Ledesma had absorbed some of the galante influences that his teacher, Francisco Javier Garcia, brought back with him from Italy.
Even more powerfully influenced by and devoted to Italian music was Ramón Carnicer (Ramón Carnicer y Batile), born in Tarrega, near Lérida in Catalonia. At 17 he went to Barcelona to pursue his musical studies, but the political turmoil in Spain led to his spending the years between 1808 and 1814 in Mahón (Minorca). While there he composed, taught and met musicians from elsewhere in Europe (including Italy), while also being active as an organist in various churches. Once back in Barcelona he taught, and directed an orchestra, his fondness for Italian music becoming more and more evident. He had a particular love of Italian opera and wrote three opera seria (to Italian librettos), for the city’s Teatro de la Cruz. From 1818 to 1820 he conducted the Italian Opera in Barcelona, before moving, in 1827, to become chief conductor at the Royal Opera in Madrid. In 1830 he was made Professor of Composition at the Conservatory in Madrid, retaining (while also being active in Madrid’s opera houses) this position until his death in 1855. As a conductor, and director, he introduced a number of Rossini’s operas to Spain and was, during his years in Madrid, a major influence in establishing Italian opera on the Spanish stage” (see S.A. Stroudemire, ‘Ramón Carnicer and the Italian Opera in Madrid’, Hispanófila, 49, 1973, pp.41-50; the article provides a wealth of information on this topic). Interestingly, however, Carnicer frequently inserted distinctly Spanish songs into his own operas, which were otherwise entirely Italian in language and style.
It would, I think, serve no useful purpose to provide details of more of the composers whose music is recorded on this disc (and, in some cases – such as Manuel Rücker, Pablo Huertes and Paolo Bonrostro - it would be well-nigh impossible, so thoroughly have they been forgotten). But the reader will, I hope, have understood by now the nature of this disc. It doesn’t contain music which aspires to profundity or sublimity or to challenge its listeners in any way, but it does contain music which is well made and which provides, as it did for those who played or heard it in the salons of Madrid early in the Nineteenth Century, intelligent and sophisticated entertainment of a distinctively Spanish kind. To listen to it straight through – something I wouldn’t recommend – would be to have a musical experience roughly analogous to the gustatory experience which would follow the request for una selección de pasteles in a top-quality Spanish café; the cakes would be well made and full of flavour, and the best of such selections would include cakes reflecting the specialities of some of the different regions of Spain, just as the music on offer here includes, for example the Andalusian polo and the seguidilla from La Mancha.
Much of the music on this disc is, in the words of Celsa Alonso, “crucial in understanding the international success of musicians like Albéniz, Granados and Falla”. It will delight all who have a fondness for Spanish music, not least because these largely forgotten compositions have found such persuasive advocates in Michael Kevin Jones and Agustín Maruri, who throw valuable light on a neglected area of Spain’s musical history. The exercise benefits from the knowledgeable notes provided by the musicologist Celsa Alonso (whose subsequent publications have included La canción lírica española en el siglo XIX (1998) and Musical Creation, Popular Culture and National Construction in Contemporary Spain (2011). The recorded sound is not perhaps quite as full as it might be (the recording was made in 1999), but it is far from being unacceptable or any kind of hindrance to the listener’s pleasure.
Glyn Pursglove
Contents
Andres Rosquellas (?1781-?1827)
1. El Recuerdo (The Memory) [2:04]
Mariano Ledesma (1779-1847)
2. La Persuasion [1:21]
ANONYMOUS
3. Los deseos de un amante (A lover’s desires) [2:33]
Narciso PAZ (c.1785-c.1845)
4. Bolera (Bolero) [1:09]
5. Seguidillas Manchegas (Seguisillas from La Mancha) [0:42]
Manuel RŰCKER (?)
6. La plegaria (The prayer) [2::23]
7. ‘Nice burlada’, o los ojuelos [1:57]
8. ‘Nice vengada’, o los ojuelos [2:09]
9. ‘Nice cauta’, o del dicho al hecho [1:07]
10. ANONYMOUS
11. ‘Tirana’ (El Tripili Trapala) [0:50]
Ramon CARNICER (1789-1855)
12. El Nuebo Sereni [3:13]
13. La criada (The maid) [1:31]
14. El currillo [2:35]
15. El caramba [1:52]
Esteban MORENO (?)
16. Una verdad (A truth) [1:44]
17. El retrato (The portrait) [2:34]
18. La primavera (Spring) [1:34]
19. El deseo inocente (The innocent desire) [2:46]
Manuel GARCIA (1775-1832) arr. Francisco Baltar
20. El polo del contrabandista [2:21]
Pablo BONROSTRO (?)
21. El Barco del vapor (The steam boat) [2:04]
José Melchior GOMIS (1791-1836)]
22. El Curro marinero [1:30]
Luis CEPEDA (1819-1889)
23. La granadina [1:49]
ANONYMOUS
24. El page (The page) [2:30]
Pablo HUERTOS (?)
25. Tirana [1:31]
26. El Li-Li [1:26]
Pablo del MORAL (?1765-?1805)
27. Tirana [3:05]
ANONYMOUS
28. La abispa (The wasp) [1:52]
Cristobal OUDRID (1825-1877) arr. Tomâs Damas
29. La Macarena [2:37]
