Event

José Luís Nieto
music of Scarlatti y Falla

Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer who spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. He is classified primarily as a Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical style and he was one of the few Baroque composers to transition into the classical period. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas. Only a small fraction of Scarlatti’s compositions were published during his lifetime; Scarlatti himself seems to have overseen the publication in 1738 of the most famous collection, his 30 Essercizi («Exercises»). These were well received throughout Europe, and were championed by the foremost English writer on music of the eighteenth century, Charles Burney. The many sonatas which were unpublished during Scarlatti’s lifetime have appeared in print irregularly in the two and a half centuries since. Scarlatti has attracted notable admirers, including Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Ivo Pogorelic, Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Heinrich Schenker, Vladimir Horowitz, Emil Gilels, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and Marc-André Hamelin. Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and some in early sonata form, and mostly written for the harpsichord or the earliest pianofortes. (There are four for organ, and a few for small instrumental group). Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys. Aside from his many sonatas, Scarlatti composed a number of operas and cantatas, symphonias, and liturgical pieces. Well known works include the Stabat Mater of 1715 and the Salve Regina of 1757, which is thought to be his last composition.

With Manuel de Falla, Spanish music found its true form in the XX century, at a time when it found itself in an impasse, split between the increasing favour gained by popular forms of expression, which were being produced at a staggering pace through the zarzuelas, the received tradition of the Spanish guitar, which had been well instilled in the popular culture by this time, and the international dominance of the music; while the emergence of nationalistic themes throughout the second half of the XVIII and all of the XIX century resulted in the formulation of a different tone, as it were, for German, French and Italian music above all, in Spain the national flavour steered differently. While Manuel de Falla’s professional life goes through so many stages and is so extensive that it is difficult to identify which, exactly, was his most proficient time, it remains certain that his days in Paris marked his early stages and led him to produce some of his most affecting work. But once Manuel de Falla finds himself back in Spain, the impact of folklore and nationalism begins to give way in his work, in favour of a more traditional melody, which is still enriched by the Spanish sound, as it were. Following the end of the Spanish Civil War, Manuel de Falla was forced to emigrate once again, this time to Argentina, where he would live until his death in 1946. El amor brujo is a ballet composed in 1914-1915 by Manuel de Falla to a libretto by Gregorio Martínez Sierra. The work is distinctively Andalusian in character with the songs in the Andalusian Spanish dialect of the Gypsies. The music contains moments of remarkable beauty and originality; it includes the celebrated «Danza ritual del fuego» (Ritual Fire Dance), «Canción del fuego fatuo» (Song of Wildfire, or Song Of The Will-o’-the-Wisp) and the «Danza del terror» (Dance of Terror). El amor brujo was commissioned in 1914 as a gitanería (gypsy piece) by Pastora Imperio, a renowned flamenco gypsy dancer. It was scored for cantaora voice, actors and chamber orchestra and performed at the Teatro Lara, Madrid, on 15 April 1915, unsuccessfully.