Corazon de mujer (1927)

Corazon de mujer is a surprising work to come from Turina, whose music tends towards an extravagant “sevillanismo,” an academic earnestness left over from his time as a student at the Schola Cantorum in Paris or, at best, a justly proportioned combination of the two. The popular-song element of Corazon de mujer, which is charmingly very much of its “flapper” time, derives perhaps from the time the composer spent in South America in the 1920s. Wherever it comes from, far from reducing the woman’s situaton to triviality, the superfically sophisticated trendiness associated with her in the first two stanzas makes her all the more vulnerable to her disappointment, expressed with flamenco passion, in the central section of the piece. So when the popular-song idiom is restored, after an extended piano interlude, her plight seems all the more poignant.