Cinco canciones negras (1945-46)

Cuba dentro de un piano

Punto de Habanera

Chévere

Canción de cuna para dormir a un negrito

Canto negro

Many-sided and long-surviving composer though he was, Montsalvatge’s international reputation rests on one relatively short period in the 1940s and early 1950s. He had been interested for some time in Afro-American music – the black contralto Marion Anderson had inspired a cult for the Spiritual in Barcelona in the 1930s – but what really fascinated him, as a Catalan, was the blend of African and Spanish elements he discovered in the popular music of Cuba. He collected examples from Catalan emigrants who had returned to the Costa Brava from Cuba after the war of independence, prepared a selection of them for publication in his Album de habaneras in 1948 and, inevitably, absorbed the idiom into his own style. Of the several vocal and instrumental works he composed under the Cuban influence, by far the most successful was the Cinco canciones negras written for the Catalan singer Mercedes Plantada between 1945 and 1946.

The emblem of what came to be known as “Cuban counterpoint” is the habanera, a dance which had originated in Europe in the distant past but which had developed its distinctive features in the mixed-race culture of Havana before it came back to Spain in the nineteenth century. Its characteristically languorous rhythm echoes throughout the first song in the set, Cuba dentro de un piano, indolently reflecting Rafael Alberti’s nostalgia for the old Cuba and admitting an expression of anger only at the end as the Spaniards’ ‘Si’ is displaced by the Americans’ ‘Yes.’ Punto de Habanera is not in habanera rhythm: it would suit the title of the song, obviously, but not the flirtatious gait of Néstor Luján’s Creole girl as she walks past the admiring sailors in her white crinoline. The composer’s hard-edged response to Nicolàs Guillén’s surreal visions in Chévere most effectively offsets his setting of Ildefonso Pereda Valdés’s Canción de cuna para dormir a un negrito, which is not only the most popular item in the set but also, with its carressing harmonies and its gently rocking version of the habanera rhythm, one of the tenderest lullabies in the repertoire. In vivid contrast, Canto negro, another setting of words by the CubanGuillén, is an exhilarating celebration of the rumba-like rhythm of the yambó.