PROGRAM NOTES by Phillip Huscher

Manuel de Falla Born November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain. Died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina.

Three Dances from El amor brujo (Love, the magician)

Falla composed El amor brujo between November 1914, and April 1915; the first performance was given on April 2, 1915, in Madrid. He subsequently revised the score as a ballet with singing; this version was first performed on March 20, 1916, in Madrid. The orchestra for the Three Dances consists of two flutes and piccolo, oboe and english horn, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings. Performance time is approximately fifteen minutes.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s first subscription concert performance of music from Falla’s El amor brujo was given at Orchestra Hall on March 28, 1944, with Hans Lange conducting. Our most recent subscription concert performances were given at Medinah Temple on May 22, 23, 24, 25, and 27, 1997, with Jennifer Larmore as soloist and Daniel Barenboim conducting. The Orchestra first performed music from the ballet at the Ravinia Festival on July 27, 1941, with Carlos Chávez conducting, and most recently on July 29, 1994, with Hugh Wolff conducting.

Before Manuel de Falla, the most widely known Spanish music was written by French and Russian composers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when a fascination with Spain reached fever pitch, many musicians were attracted to the exoticism, the romance, and the local color of the Iberian peninsula. By the time Falla began to compose, in the first years of the twentieth century, works like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnole and Bizet’s Carmen defined the Spanish sensibility to the man on the street more than any other works of art—even though Bizet, for one, had never set foot in Spain.

When Manuel de Falla moved from his native Spain to Paris in 1907 to expand his musical horizons and to experience the avant-garde first-hand, he encountered a city intoxicated with music evoking his homeland. Debussy was at work on the largest ―Spanish‖ work of his career, the great orchestral Ibéria. And Ravel was beginning both his own orchestral showpiece, the Rapsodie espagnole, and his one-act opera L’heure espagnole. Ravel came by his Spanish fascination naturally (his mother was Basque), and it was no doubt heightened by his early close friendship with the remarkable Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, to whom Falla would eventually dedicate his Nights in the Gardens of Spain. (Ravel remained under the spell of Spain to his dying day—Boléro and the Don Quixote songs are among his last compositions.)

Falla’s search for a natural Spanish expression began just as composers from other countries had virtually exhausted their interest in Spain’s exotic atmosphere. During his years in Paris, Falla arrived at a new understanding of how to compose music that evoked the spirit of a place but, at the same time, conveyed a deeper message in a universal language. ―Truth without authenticity‖ became Falla’s rallying cry, and ultimately that is what sets his music apart, not only from that of his Spanish predecessors and the many contemporary faux-Spanish composers, but also from most of the other nationalistic work popular at the time.

While Falla was doing ―field‖ work by harmonizing Seven Popular Spanish Songs, he began to compose El amor brujo, for which he wrote original melodies that sounded like folk tunes. The idea for the work came from Pastora Imperio, one of the great Andalusian gypsy dancers—the empress of all the Spanish dances, as she was later called. She originally contacted the poet and choreographer Gregorio Martínez Sierra requesting a song and dance stage work to be performed by members of her family. Imperio and her mother, the well-known flamenco artist Rosario ―la Mejorana,‖ sang songs and told stories to Martínez and Falla, who took careful notes and then created his own freely invented music. For three months during the winter of 1914–15, Falla worked round the clock, in a room filled with cigarette smoke and fumes from the gas stove. He was never happier, he later said.

El amor brujo was poorly received when it was first performed by Pastora Imperio’s family in Madrid in 1915. Significantly, it was accused of lacking Spanish character, although Falla was delighted—and vindicated—by the performers’ insistence that they were enthralled by the music and felt it to be truly their own. One night, Falla took the pianist Arthur Rubinstein to a performance, and Rubinstein was so overwhelmed by Pastora Imperio’s rendition of the Ritual Fire Dance in particular that he asked for the score so that he could arrange it for piano. Falla modestly said he doubted that the music would make much effect, but when Rubinstein played the dance as an encore at his next concert, the audience went wild. (―I had to repeat it three times,‖ the pianist recalled.)

The following year, Falla expanded the orchestration of El amor brujo—the original version called for just eight instruments—and cut out much of the vocal music, leaving only four songs. Both an orchestral suite with singing, and selected dances, like the three performed this week, have made El amor brujo one of Falla’s most popular scores in the concert hall.

María Martínez Sierra, the poet’s widow, summarized the action:

A love-stricken gypsy woman, whose feelings are not returned by the object of her attentions, resorts to magic arts—sorcery, witchcraft, and such—to soften the unresponsive man’s heart . . . and she succeeds. After a night of spells, conjurations, mysterious charms, and more or less ritual dances, Aurora wakes at dawn along with Love, who had been sleeping soundly, and bells ring out the morning’s victory.

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

For the record The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded Falla’s El amor brujo in 1963 with Leontyne Price as soloist and Fritz Reiner conducting for RCA (1964 Grammy Award winner for best classical performance—vocal soloist). A 1997 performance with Jennifer Larmore as soloist and Daniel Barenboim conducting is included on From the Archives, vol. 20: A Tribute to Daniel Barenboim.

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