2 Paisajes

La Fuente y la Campana

El Lago

Partly French by descent, Mompou studied piano and harmony in Paris before the First World War and on his return to France in 1921 he chose to stay there for as long as twenty years. The composers he most admired among his contemporaries, Satie and Debussy prominent among them, were French. His true home, however, was Barcelona, where he spent the first eighteen and the last forty-six years of his life, and the sources of his inspiration were predominantly Catalan. His major piano work, Cançons i Danses, which he started in 1918 and completed in 1962, is based almost entirely on Catalan songs and dances.

In the absence of bar lines and key signatures much of Mompou’s music looks on the printed page like something by Satie. For the most part, however, its sound is distinctively its own. When the composer described his style as “primitivista” he was using the word in a very special sense, meaning not crudity but a rediscovered freshness: “I make music like this because art has reached its limits… my art is to return to the primitive… no, not even to return but to begin again.” No one could accuse La Fuente y la Campana (The Fountain and the Bell), one of the first pieces he wrote after his return to Barcelona from Nazi-occupied Paris in 1941, of crudity. Indeed, though inspired by a courtyard near the cathedral in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, it avoids superficial illustration of splashing water and ringing bell sounds and aspires instead to the essence of those things. El Lago (The Lake), the second of the three Paisajes (Landscapes) was written five years later. Another evocation of a familiar feature of Barcelona, a lake in the park on Montjuic, it is a characteristic product of the principle Mompou was most concerned to communicate to his pupils, “the maximum expression with the minimum of means.”

Rupert Avis ©2003