Composers › Manuel de Falla › Programme note
Siete canciones populares españolas
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
(Seven Spanish Folk Songs)
El paño moruno
Seguidilla murciana
Asturiana
Jota
Nana
Canción
Polo
Falla is said to have received less than the price of a bottle of champagne for his Siete canciones populares españolas. After he had sold the rights to the score, it became one of his most popular works, attracting arrangements for voice and orchestra from composers as distinguished as Ernesto Halffter and Luciano Berio and transcriptions for a variety of instrumental combinations. The original stimulus came from a young Spanish soprano whom Falla met during the rehearsal of La Vida breve in Paris in January 1914 and who asked him for advice on a recital programme she was planning. That got him thinking and, finding inspiration and some source material in the Cancionero popular español by his revered teacher Felipe Pedrell, he had more or less completed the work before the outbreak of war forced him to return to Spain nine months later. It was first performed by Luisa Vela with the composer at the piano at the Ateneo in Madrid in January 1915.
All seven of the songs are based on traditional Spanish melodies accompanied by harmonies derived from their modality and, for the most part, dance rhythms appropriate to the regions of Spain where they originate. While the piano part imitates the sound and figurations of the Spanish guitar, the vocal part retains something of the colouring associated with the tunes in their natural setting, like the flamenco-style exclamations of “Ay!” in the opening El Paño murano and the fiercely conclusive Polo. Between the two there is a lively muleteer’s dance in Seguidilla murciana contrasting with a lament from the North of Spain in Asturiana and, symmetrically placed on the other side of the brilliant Aragonese Jota, a matching contrast between a lullaby from the Andalusian South in Nana and an artfully lilting villancico in Cancíon.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Canciones populares españolas”
(Seven Spanish Folk Songs)
El paño moruno
Seguidilla murciana
Asturiana
Jota
Nana
Canción
Polo
Falla is said to have received less than the price of a decent bottle of champagne for his Siete canciones populares españolas. Once he had sold all rights to the Parisian publisher Max Eschig, it became one of his most popular works, attracting arrangements for voice and orchestra from composers as diverse as Ernesto Halffter and Luciano Berio and transcriptions for a variety of instrumental combinations. The original stimulus came from a young Spanish soprano whom Falla met during the rehearsals of La Vida breve in Paris in January 1914 and who asked him for advice on a recital programme she was planning. That got him thinking and, finding inspiration and some source material in the Cancionero popular español by his revered teacher Felipe Pedrell, he had more or less completed the work before the outbreak of war forced him to return to Spain nine months later. It was first performed by Luisa Vela (not the singer he met in Paris) with the composer at the piano at the Ateneo in Madrid in January 1915.
Berio’s orchestral arrangement was made in 1978 for Cathy Berberian, who was no longer his wife by then but was still an inspiration - and would remain an inspiration at least until the Requies in memoriam Cathy Berberian that he wrote on her death in 1983. Unlike some other Berio arrangements (or appropriations), it is a fairly straightforward transcription, characteristically witty but at the same time mindful of both the spirit and the letter of the voice-and-piano original. In fact, it has more than a little in common with the arrangement completed in 1945 by Falla’s Spanish pupil and disciple Ernesto Halffter. In the first song, for example, both of them make a prominent feature of the bassoon, where another composer might have opted for imitation guitars on unadorned plucked strings, and they both favour bell-like horn calls and dramatic timpani strokes in Jota. While there is little to choose between the two versions, Berio’s is the more colourful - except in Nana, where Halffter prefers sustained lines on woodwind and horn to Berio’s pizzicato violins - and it is no less authentic in sound, in spite of the rather surprising tam-tam in Seguidilla murciana.
All seven of Falla’s songs are based on traditional Spanish melodies accompanied by harmonies derived from their modality and, for the most part, dance rhythms appropriate to the regions of Spain where they originate. El paño moruno properly belongs to Murcia but - at least as Falla treats it with his use of the Andalusian scale and a flamenco-style “Ay!” - it has absorbed much from the neighbouring region to the south. Also from Murcia, the Seguidilla is a lively muleteer’s dance riding on a rhythmic ostinato. Asturiana, a lament revolving sadly and hypnotically round one note, is effectively offset by another song from the north of Spain, a brilliant Aragonese Jota presented here in orchestration all the more entertaining for its apparent allusions to Chabrier’s España. There is a similar contrast between Nana, an Andalusian lullaby rocking gently over a syncopated pizzicato pedal point, and Canción, an artfully lilting love song brightly tinged by trumpet colours. Vividly characteristic representations of Spanish folk music though all these songs are, none is as primitive in sound and effect as the concluding Polo, a flamenco dance driven by relentlessly repetitive rhythms, offset by violent dissonances, and passionately expressive of Andalusian gypsy duende.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Canciones/Berio”