España

arranged by Emile Louis

One of the most popular orchestral works written in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century, España was a source of income not only for Chabrier but also for composers of all kinds of arrangements and at least one poet. Its boundless rhythmic energy and its ecstatic tunefulness, inspired by a long holiday in Spain in 1882, stimulated such unlikely spin-offs as Waldteufel’s España Waltz and this song version by Emile Louis with appropriate words, suitably coloured by exclamations of “Olé” and “Anda,” by Eugéne Adénis.

An Auvergnat by birth and a Parisian by choice, Chabrier loved all things Spanish - well, perhaps not the fleas that plagued him there but certainly the traditional dances and no less certainly the women who performed them. The four months he spent in Spain in the summer and autumn of 1882 inspired an orchestral rhapsody - “una fantasia extraordinaria, muy española” as Chabrier described it in his tourist Spanish - irresistible in its joy in the melodies and rhythms he had noted down on his travels. Combining what he called “the vigorous tunes of the jota” of the North with “the free and dreamy phrases of the malaguena” of the South, it is so liberated in matters of rhythm and harmony that Gustav Mahler was moved to identify it as “the beginning of all modern music.”

Rehearsing España with the New York Philharmonic one day, Gustav Mahler remarked that you could see “the beginning of all modern music” in it. To an orchestra that had surely never suspected that there might be anything epoch-making about the piece, great fun though it was to play, the conductor’s observation must have seemed more than a little eccentric. In fact, Chabrier’s extravagant enthusiasm for the music of Spain, the irrepressible ebullience of his personality and his scant respect for convention combined in España to create a score that broke the mould of music as it was at the time. The distinctive rhythmic energy and harmonic colour of the piece, both derived from Spanish folk music rather than concert-hall precedence, and the peculiar brilliance of the orchestration were all new at the time.

When España was first performed, in Paris in November 1884, the audience was blown away by the thrill of a fresh sensation. Chabrier had started writing the piece on his return home from a four-month holiday in Spain at the end of 1882 when the sounds and sights and smells were still vividly alive in his memory. He had written down several examples of authentic Spanish dance music on his travels and now he mixed them together in a rhapsody motivated only by the need to communicate what he could of the excitement he had experienced when he encountered them in their natural setting. If in this “fantasia extraordinaria, muy española” – as the composer described it in his tourist Spanish – rhythms clashed with each other, harmonies got out of hand or orchestration went over the top, so much the better.

The first theme heard after the vigorously bouncing introduction is a heel-tapping jota from Aragon presented initially by bassoon and muted trumpet, then by horn and harp, then by the whole orchestra. The other main theme, a more supple malaguena from Andalucia, sweeps in a little later on bassoons, horns and cellos. The one tune known to be by Chabrier himself intrudes noisily on three trombones in what briefly seemed to be lull in activity. Inspired by the memory of a group of drunken sailors bursting into a bar, it does not so much spoil the fun as, towards the end of the piece, enhance it.

The first major turning point in Chabrier’s development as a composer was a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1880. The orderly progress of the lawyer’s son from the Auvergne through the Law School in Paris to the Ministry of the Interior, where he intended to stay until he could collect his pension at the age of 60, was dramatically interrupted. Inspired by the supreme beauty and expressive scope of Wagner’s opera, he decided, at the age of 39, to resign from the Ministry and to devote himself full-time to music.

The second major turning point should have been his four-month holiday in Spain in the summer and autumn of 1882. He came back to Paris thrilled by the music and the dance of a country to which he had long been predisposed, determined to defy Wagnerian inclinations which he knew were foreign to his Latin temperament, and excited by the prospect of writing on opera on “a good Spanish libretto.” Sadly, though he literally begged his publishers to help him find one, no such libretto was forthcoming. In creative terms, the only direct results of the Spanish experience were España and Habanera. As a boy in Ambert he had been taught to play the piano by two Spanish musicians and in Paris in 1873 he had dedicated to Mme Edouard Manet a remarkable piano Impromptu which indicated how thoroughly he had absorbed the Spanish idiom long before he went to Spain. But by 1885 he was back in the Bayreuth orbit, writing Gwendoline in collaboration with the Wagnerite librettist Catulle Mendès, and (except perhaps in the late Aubade) he was never to look to Spain for inspiration again.

España was a turning point of a sort, however. The success of its first performance under the direction of Charles Lamoureux in 1883 brought the composer overnight fame, if not much of a fortune. España was (and remains) the one work automatically associated with the name of Chabrier. It has not endeared him to purist protectors of the Spanish idiom but the question of its authenticity - whether it is really “una fantasia extraordinaria, muy española,” as the composer described it to Lamoureux, or whether it is just “Plaza Clichy” or “Puerto Maillot” as Satie satirised it in his Españaña - is beside the point.

It is obviously not authentic to mingle what Chabrier described as the “vigorous tunes of the jota” of northern Spain with the “free and dreamy phrases of the malaguena” of the south - all but one of the them gathered in the field, incidentally. But when Mahler declared Chabrier’s score “the beginning of all modern music” he wasn’t thinking about authenticity. He could have been thinking of the liberating use of modal harmonies or the recklessly exuberant orchestration or, most likely, Chabrier’s fearless breach of the bar-line, the duple-time rhythms bounding across triple-time metres, the melodies ignoring the metrical divisions, the physical impulse irresistibly prevailing over rhythmic and harmonic regularity. That is what España is about.