The Three-Cornered Hat: Suite No.1:

Manuel de Falla – a serious-minded Spaniard who he was not very interested in theatrical glamour – was initially reluctant to work for Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes. When he finally succumbed to persuasion, however, and made a ballet out of a mime play he had written a couple of years earlier he could scarcely regret his decision. The first performance of “The Three-Cornered Hat” by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in London in July 1919, with authentic flamenco-inspired choreography by Massine and designs by no less an artist than Pablo Picasso, was a resounding success.

In the first of two concert suites later compiled by the composer the opening fanfare of the ballet, written to give the audience chance to admire Picasso’s bull-ring curtain design, serves as a short Introduction. It is followed without a break by music from the first scene, Afternoon, which introduces the Miller with a broodingly sombre murciana low on clarinet and cor anglais and the Miller’s Wife with the beginning of a contrastingly bright jota high on first violins. The Corregidor, the pompous old magistrate with the three-cornered hat and lustful designs on the Miller’s Wife, also makes his first entry here in a briefly comic bassoon solo.

The Dance of the Miller’s Wife, an exuberantly orchestrated fandango combining high energy with sensual grace, is not calculated to dampen the magistrate’s ardour. He registers his reaction in another comic little bassoon solo and the Miller’s Wife gently mocks him with an old-style minuet. In the next scene, The Grapes, which also follows without a break, she teases him with the fruit she is picking from the vine outside the mill and leads him a dance in which, inevitably, he trips and falls to the ground. He leaves, much discomfited, and the Miller joins his Wife in a reprise of the fandango from the previous movement.