La vida breve (A Short Life)

Interlude – Dance

La vida breve was not Falla’s first work for the stage – he had already tried, and failed, to establish a reputation in the popular zarzuela form – but it did bring him his first success in the theatre. Written in Madrid in 1905 in collaboration with the librettist Carlos Fernandez Shaw, it was entered into a competition for a Spanish opera in one act, which it duly won. Although the promised production of the winning entry at the Teatro Real did not materialise, the competition had at least encouraged Falla to complete a work which, translated into French and reshaped in two acts, was performed with great success in Nice in 1913 and even greater success at the Opéra-Comique in Paris later in the same year.

What the French audience – not to mention musicians like Debussy and Dukas – liked about La vida breve is that they were hearing for the first time an opera set in Spain and furnished with authentically idiomatic Spanish music, rather than the picture-postcard stuff that French composers from Bizet onwards could deliver with such facility. Falla’s score is inspired not by just any Spanish idiom but by flamenco music of the kind associated particularly with the gypsy quarter of Granada, where the action of the opera takes place. Its central figure, Salud, lives in the gypsy community on the Albaicin hill. Her lover Paco, however, comes from a higher social level and, in spite of his protestations of love in a duet with Salud in the first act, he firmly intends to marry a rich girl of his own class. Salud is warned of the situation and, indeed, in the second act she watches Paco’s wedding celebrations through a window in his bride’s home and, after publicly denouncing him for his treachery, dies of a broken heart.

Of the two pieces extracted from the opera to be performed on this occasion, the first is an arrangement of the Interlude linking the two acts and designed to be played as the scene is changed behind a drop-curtain depicting Granada at sunset as seen from the Sacro Monte. The dramatic beginning reflects the turmoil in Salud’s emotions, the extent of her passion expressed in almost Wagnerian terms in aching string lines. As night falls over the city, the calls of flower and fruit sellers are briefly echoed on woodwind and distant snatches of a dance tune are heard on the same instruments. As is confirmed by the second extract (which follows with a break), the dance tune hinted at in the Interlude was an anticipation of the jota which is sung and danced in honour of Paco’s bride at their wedding reception: its lively triple-time rhythm is initiated by bassoon and pizzicato strings, its buoyant melody introduced by violins and taken up by woodwind before it is pushed aside, apparently in duple time at first, by a quicker and heavier middle section. The opening theme returns in new instrumental colours and ends with a characteristic flamenco stamping of the dancers’ heels.

Gerald Larner © 2011