This puts me in mind of a Sunday afternoon a while
back, trudging round some stately home, garden or caves, I don’t remember
which, in the wake of a guide; all of a sudden my memory was pricked
and I realised I had been there some twenty years before, trudging round
in the wake of the very same guide, who had said all the same things,
down to the same jokes, the same repartee with children, the same mock-galanterie
with the ladies. And the remarkable thing was that the performance hadn’t
staled in the least. All the props he needed were a few children and
a couple of old ladies (did he never come up against a group that had
none?) and he was off and away, spinning his art like a new cloth. At
the end I remarked on this to someone present, considerably older than
myself, and got the astonishing reply that "I first came here before
the war and the guide was this same man’s father, and he said all these
same things and told all these same jokes".
So here we have Nin, father and son (Culmell was the
mother’s surname), in two CDs of folk-derived Spanish songs spanning
74 years, with little apparent variation in style, especially if we
make the comparison with Nin père’s sparer-textured 10
Villancicos (Christmas songs) rather than the more elaborate 20 popular
Spanish songs. Nin the elder was quite up-to-date harmonically for 1923
(his birdsong in El Cant dels Ocells occupies a midway point
between Debussy and Messaien), while Nin-Culmell is a tonally-based
composer of the type we have come to accept as modern only recently.
You really might think they were contemporaries. And yet, how freshly-minted
and alluring it all sounds, in 1997 as in 1950 and as it did back in
1923!
However, as the attractive picture forms in one’s mind
of a family cottage industry, two generations of songsmiths based somewhere
deep in Spain, it turns out that life is rarely so simple, for Nin the
father abandoned the family in 1912 and virtually none of Nin-Culmell’s
life was actually spent in Spain. What relations he had with his father
is a story not told in the booklets to these discs, which offer detailed
information on the purely musical activities of the two musicians. So
I’ll fill out what I can.
Joaquín Nin y Castellanos, to give him his full
name, was born in Cuba in 1879, the son of a Spanish (Catalan) soldier
posted in the then colony and his Cuban wife. The family moved to Barcelona
in 1880 but Cuba seems to have acted as a leitmotiv in Nin’s life. He
returned there at the turn of the century and married Rosa Culmell Vaurigaud.
Of Danish-French parentage, Rosa Culmell belonged to a family of wealthy
landowners in Cuba who were none too keen on her liaison with the struggling
young pianist-composer; nevertheless, the young couple enjoyed the financial
support of Nin’s parents-in-law in the peripatetic years that followed.
They were living in Paris when their daughter Anaïs, later to become
a major writer, was born in 1903, they were back in Cuba for the birth
of their second child Thorvald in 1905, and Nin-Culmell himself was
born in Berlin in 1908. There followed another return to Cuba in 1909,
a failed attempt to create a National Conservatoire, after which the
family moved to Brussels. At this stage the financial support of Rosa’s
parents appears to have been no longer forthcoming. In 1912 Nin, who
has been described as a "philandering, abusive and immature"
man who made no secret of his sexual adventures, sent his wife and children
to live with his parents in Barcelona and abandoned the family for ever.
He moved to Paris and in 1913 paid his attentions to a 16-year-old pupil
of rich family, Maruca Rodriguez.
In 1914 Rosa, finding life impossible with her severe
father-in-law (though her mother-in-law was kindly), set sail with her
children for New York, where a sister of hers lived. The lacerating
psychological scars all this wrought on Anaïs are well-known, for
while on board the ship she began what was to become her most famous
work, a diary in the form of unposted letters to her father, beseeching
his return. The effect on Nin-Culmell has not been told, so far as I
know; maybe he has no wish to tell it. He remained close to his sister
till her death in 1977 (Thorvald became a businessman and rather dropped
out of the picture).
Nin the father’s career as a pianist now took off and
he became a leading member of that élite group of Spanish musicians
living in Paris, including Albéniz, Granados, de Falla, Turina
and the pianist Ricardo Viñes. He was particularly noted for
his researches into old keyboard music, both French and Spanish, of
which he became pioneering exponent. He edited modern editions of works
by Soler and others. He also lived, according to Turina, "like
a prince" in the elegant suburb of St. Cloud, where he kept a salon
which vied with that of Albéniz as a milieu where the best of
Parisian musical society could be met.
The CD booklet virtually brushes under the carpet Nin’s
failings as a family man to draw a rather different picture of him as
an artist. "Joaquín Nin built an ethical framework in which
he developed his activity. Art was for him a serious obligation with
a mission, to which the interpreter is committed, that requires renunciations
and strict duties. ‘Rather than serving the masses and the audiences,
he devoted himself to serving music’, said Jean-Aubry". Nin was
first and foremost a pianist and his output of compositions is small,
consists almost entirely of works for piano, violin and piano, and voice
and piano, and is mostly folksong-based. Nonetheless, such is the imagination
and invention he brought to bear on the folk-melodies included on the
present CD that his work has to be considered a treasure-house of beautiful
music. The piano introductions and interludes are often quite extended
and, though Nin’s admiration for Debussy is evident, the music possesses
a sharper-edged, austere personality of its own. The Spanish spirit
is always present but without recourse to cheap picture-postcard effects.
The effect is rather more elaborate than its ostensible model, de Falla’s
7 Canciones populares españolas and a possible parallel
could be found in Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne which are,
however, thanks to their orchestral garb, much lusher in effect and
maybe ultimately less distinguished. The 10 Villancicos are more
concise and perhaps finer still; they also point the way towards the
work of Nin-Culmell. The Chant du veilleur is, at just under
six minutes, the longest piece on the disc and despite the haunting
effect of the saxophone obbligato, perhaps shows that Nin was best at
miniatures.
From 1924 to 1938 Nin-Culmell lived in Paris, at first
to study at the Schola Cantorum and later to attend Paul Dukas’s classes
at the Conservatoire. He also obtained advice and encouragement from
de Falla. His sister Anaïs was also in Paris from 1924-1939, a
period principally spent in betraying her husband, most famously and
publicly with Henry Miller, and thereby obtaining rich source material
for the explicit sexuality of the novels which followed. The brother
and daughter certainly saw their father during this period, though in
Anaïs’s case, at least, the wounds created by his early abandonment
of the family were too deep to heal. By the outbreak of the Second World
War all three were safely across the Atlantic. Cuba had again drawn
Nin the elder like a magnet, and this time he remained there, a forgotten
figure in Europe, until his death in 1949. Nin-Culmell undertook an
active career in the United States as pianist and teacher; he has been
Professor Emeritus of the University of Berkeley since 1974. Also in
the United States, Anaïs embarked on her notable literary career,
culminating in the posthumous publication of her diaries in their unexpurgated
form in 1985; unfaithful to her husband in so many ways, she maintained
her promise that certain passages which regarded him would not be published
in his lifetime.
Nin-Culmell had shown some of his earliest compositions
to de Falla in 1929 and had built up quite an impressive portfolio of
works by the time he moved definitively to the United States. His interest
in song dates from 1950, however, and demonstrates his almost obsessive
identification with Spain, a country he hardly knew at first hand; all
his vocal music uses texts in some form of Spanish and the writing is
pervaded by Spanish rhythms and turns of phrase. This is an art which
wastes no time in frills or padding; though the piano parts must be
rewarding to play there are no long preludes or interludes. The music
is tonally rooted, if with a higher level of dissonance than the composer’s
father would have allowed. On the other hand, Nin-Culmell does not hesitate
to open one of the most recent pieces with a C major arpeggio.
If this suggests a limited art, I would say that Nin-Culmell’s
achievement exceeds that of his father; the sheer succinctness and precision
with which he makes his points are things to be wondered at. If Nin
suggests a parallel with Canteloube, Nin-Culmell, in his ability to
suggest so much with so little, makes us think of another Spanish miniaturist,
Mompou. If I don’t single out any songs in particular it is because
the level is so uniformly high. I would say, though, that any singer
wanting to take just one song into the repertoire might try Si ves
un monte de espumas, a touching piece and at 3’ 15" the longest
on the disc.
The lack of texts and translations is regrettable;
the Nin disc has them, but a fairly haphazard job has been done, with
some omitted, with the result that the track numbers in the booklet
do not correspond to the disc (the listings on the back cover are correct);
one text is printed twice under different titles, and the English of
what’s left is often weird. Fortunately the booklet notes themselves
seem to have posed less difficulty for the translator.
That the music gets over this obstacle is due in no
small measure to the truly outstanding singer, Elena Gragera. A new
name to me, she has a voice which is perfectly even over the not very
wide range demanded by this music, totally free of wobble, with every
note taken truly and precisely, acquiring natural vibrations – rather
than vibrato as such – in the long notes. What arouses my curiosity
is that, while very high notes are not called for (a fleeting A flat
at the end of one song is the maximum), many of the songs lie around
the medium-high range of C to F, an area where mezzos normally do not
like singing since it lies across the break in the voice. Most of the
mezzos I know would, I think, wish to sing these songs in lower keys.
Gragera seems perfectly happy up there and her timbre, while not losing
the mezzo richness of her lower octave, acquires a virginal quality
that might lead the uninformed listener to suppose she is singing stratospherically
high – without any effort. Clearly there is not the body of voice required
for most 19th and 20th Century operas, but Gragera’s curriculum shows
that she concentrates on recital work, and has studied lieder with Irmgard
Seefried and Edith Mathis and Bach with Aafie Heynis. So far as I can
tell without a working knowledge of the language being sung she puts
over her words with care and is unfailingly musical in her phrasing.
Since she would seem to have all that is needed to be an outstanding
interpreter of a wide range of lieder, mélodies and the like,
I hope her future career on disc will not be dedicated wholly to Spanish
song, welcome though that will always be from her. Add an excellent
pianist and a fine recording and these two discs represent a discovery
of major importance, both for the music and the singer.
Christopher Howell
Elena Gragera (mezzosoprano),
Antón Cardó (piano), Miquel Bofill (saxophone)* 