Navarra

One of two very different piano pieces left incomplete on Albéniz’s death, Navarra was intended for the fourth book of Iberia but was abandoned because of his fear that it was too “plebeian” for that particular collection. Certainly, it has nothing of the delicate poetry of Jerez, which replaced it in Iberia and is nowhere near as thoughtful or as developed in structure. It is no less inspired, however, even if dissonance is put to comic rather than expressive use in this case and even if it is so uninhibited in its celebration of Spanish melody that, as he was obviously aware, it could invite the more fastidious of his critics to question the composer’s taste. His friend and colleague Déodat de Séverac, who supplied the last twenty-seven bars of Navarra for its publication in 1912, evidently had the imagination to understand that exuberance and vulgarity are not necessarily the same thing.

The clashing bitonal chords in the opening bars, where A flat major eventually wins a noisy competition with F minor, give some notice of the sort of thing that is to follow. It is scarcely predictable, however, that, shortly after the entry of the first main theme, the right hand should slip into F flat while the left continues in A flat and then, in an effort to correct the anomaly, make matters even worse. The way out of the situation is to pretend that F flat was always intended and that the right hand was merely anticipating the moment a few bars later when the left joins it in a mutually agreeable modulation into that unlikely key.

A brief but brilliant development, which begins with a grotesquely emphatic recall of the bitonal opening bars, is cut short by a dramatic pause, a grandiloquent build-up of expectation and the ffff entry of the broadly expansive theme of the middle section. Albéniz treats this popular tune, absurdly but irresistibly, with every Lisztian and Spanish vernacular means at his disposal. If Dédoat de Séverac asked himself if Albéniz would have recalled it in the coda, after the full-scale reprise of the first section, he clearly decided that he wouldn’t and that an echo of the earlier harmonic anomalies would make for a wittier ending.