Trois Mélodies (1909)

Les Colombes

Chinoiserie

Séguidille

It might be assumed that Falla was drawn to Gautier by the writer’s passion for Spain, as demonstrated in his travelogue Voyage en Espagne or the forty-three poems collected in España. In fact, although he did choose to set Séguidille from España along with Les colombes and Chinoiserie from La comédie de la mort, Falla approached all three poems as a French rather than Spanish composer. It was as though, after two years in Paris, where he had settled in 1907, he wanted to prove that he was as sophisticated a musician as any of his French contemporaries. If there is a trace of guitar figuration in the accompaniment to Les colombes, the piano writing - which is worthy of a Debussy or a Ravel - is no less exquisite for that. The word-setting is technically perfect and the vocal line most effectively drawn round the central climax. In spite of its colourful use of the Chinese scale, Chinoiserie is just as Parisian, subscribing as it does to the current fashion for all things oriental and anticipating Ravel’s Laideronette (in Ma Mère l’oye) by a matter of months. Falla risked the largely unaccompanied first stanza on the advice of Debussy, who had found an earlier version too crowded in texture. As for Séguidille - which is dedicated to Debussy’s second wife Emma Bardac - it is Spanish music as a French composer might have written it. It is brilliantly entertaining and unquestionably idiomatic but, with the decorative details and the (unpitched) cries of “Alza!” and “Ola!” so extravagantly applied, it is a reflection of picture-postcard Spain, like the poem itself, rather than the Spain of, say, Falla’s own Canciones populares españolas.