Iberia: 12 new Impressions in four books

Book 1 (1906)

Evocación: Allegretto espressivo

El Puerto: Allegro commodo

El Corpus en Sevilla: Allegro gracioso - vivo - andante

Book 2 (1906)

Rondeña: Allegretto

Almería: Allegretto moderato - andante

Triana: Allegretto con anima

Book 3 (1907)

El Albaicín: Allegro assai, ma melancolico

El polo: Allegro melancolico

Lavapiés: Allegretto bien rythmé mais sans presser

Book 4 (1908)

Málaga: Allegro vivo

Jerez: Andantino

Eritaña: Allegretto grazioso

When Debussy declared that Albéniz “put the best of himself” into Iberia he was actually understating the extent of his Spanish colleague’s achievement. In Iberia Albéniz transformed himself. It is a big work –four books of three pieces each, lasting not far short of 90 minutes in all – and it is an immense virtuoso challenge. But its greatest quality, which distinguishes it from even the most accomplished of his earlier piano music, is its newly evolved keyboard language. Albéniz seems to have realised that a piano technique derived basically from Liszt and material drawn from Spanish folk-music are essentially incompatible. Certainly after La Vega, which illustrates the problem most vividly, he wrote no more piano music until, eight years later, he started on Iberia. Completed only a year before his death, it was his masterpiece and his last major work.

Albéniz’s new keyboard language is a translation into piano terms of the authentic texture of Andalusian folk music, not just its characteristic rhythms and its modal harmonies but its actual sound, the plucked articulation of the guitar, the impassioned singing voice, the percussive effects of castanets, hand claps and heel taps. He had been working towards it for years, of course – and both Debussy and Ravel had anticipated it to some extent – but it wasn’t until he came to write Iberia that his new language was so well developed as to sustain a work of such length without regular recourse to conventional piano writing. The romantic piano is still there but, for the most part, merged into the new style, filling it out and elaborating it but not contradicting it.

As an evocation of the spirit of Spanish music rather than an allusion to one particular place, Evocación at the beginning of Book 1 is more generalised in its local colouring than the other pieces in the collection. The port referred to in El Puerto has been identified as Santa Maria on the Bay of Cádiz. Albéniz recalls the atmosphere of the place with a polo, an animated dance in 6/8 time coloured by brusque syncopations and vigorous heel taps. El Corpus en Sevilla is outstanding among the twelve “impressions” not only because it is the one programmatic piece in the collection but also because – based as it is    on a memory of a Corpus Christi celebration in Seville – it is so startlingly visionary in its inspiration.

One of the most interesting effects of Albéniz’s contact with Spanish folk music was its liberation of his rhythms. Book 2 opens with Rondeña which features the version of the Andalusian fandango associated with the gorge-split town of Ronda. Alternating 6/8 with 3/4, it is contrasted and combined with an expressive vocal melody ingeniously notated to ensure that its natural rhythms fit without distortion into the prevailing metre. Almería, on the Mediterranean and well to the east of Ronda but still in Andalusia, inspired a similar kind of piece. At the heart of Almería, as of Rondeña, is a vocal melody metrically distinct from its accompaniment – in this case an expressive copla in 4/4 time sensitively set against the 6/8 continuing from the first section and destined to remain the underlying metre throughout. The sound of the flamenco guitar is nowhere clearer in Book 2 of Iberia than in Triana. An evocation of the Triana district of Seville, it takes the same shape as most of the other movements in the collection, with a lively paso doble set in direct contrast to a song-like material with a more sustained melodic line. The quiet coda, apart from the very loud last two bars, is pure guitar.

The first piece of Book 3, El Albaicín, is one of the most poetic of all Albéniz’s evocations of Andalusia. Named after the old gypsy quarter in Granada, it reminded Debussy “of those Spanish evenings filled with the perfume of carnations and the alcoholic fumes of aguardiente” – though probably not until the sultry ending of the piece. A somewhat melancholy nocturnal scene in B flat minor to begin with, it is based on two themes – a dance rhythm heard as though on a distant guitar that gets more animated as it gets nearer and, an expressive cante hondo melody introduced in octaves in the Dorian mode. El polo is a peculiarly ambiguous piece, an unhappy guitarist’s brooding improvisation on an obsessive polo rhythm, the lively dance implications of which are negated by the tortured modulations it goes through and the bitter harmonies it collides with. The last piece in Book 3 is reputedly the most difficult in the whole work and is certainly the only one (apart from the introductory Evocación) which finds its inspiration outside Andalusia. Although it is named after a district of Madrid traditionally associated with the Maundy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, Lavapiés is an impression not of a church event but of a rowdy popular celebration.

Málaga has its own distinctive version of the fandango, the comparatively languorous or even melancholy malagueña. After a capricious guitarist’s prelude, Albéniz’s Málaga at the start of Book 4 features two such dances, the first of them attracting the more dramatic treatment. Jerez, replacing the discarded Navarra, was the last of the twelve “impressions” to be written and is the longest piece in the whole collection. The construction is held together by an unfailing interest in a little cadence figure first heard in the second bar and heard again in nearly every bar thereafter. Always intended to be the last piece in Iberia, Eritaña –    named after a popular tavern outside the customs gates in Seville – is another popular celebration. Based on sevillana rhythms throughout, it has no time for the love song found in most of the other pieces. The odd lyrical item is admitted from time to time, just enough to add a little variety to the atmosphere but never enough to halt the reckless modulations, the ribald dissonances and the intoxicated piano writing.

Gerald Larner ©2009