Spanish Love Songs

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

The music and poetry of Spain have had a fascination for audiences and performers. The distinctive rhythms of its folk dances, the modal harmonies, and the timbers of its native instruments permeate the classical music of this country, and have been used to spice the compositional styles of composers throughout the western hemisphere since the early nineteenth century. Folk song traditions run deep throughout Spain; they are sung in conjunction with annual festivals, folk dances, or as work songs. This type of music played a great part in the daily life of Spain well into the twentieth century, far longer than in other countries where commercial music, combined with migration toward city life, had eroded this strong connection to their indigenous music.

The immediately recognizable color of Spanish music, full of vigor and macho arrogance, serves as a foil to the nature of Spanish love poetry. Here, love is a deadly game. It’s true that the metaphors of languishing, burning, and dying for love are pretty well universal, but in these poems, combined with this musical language, there is a darker streak of seriousness. The typical French song seduces with melancholy, like Duparc’s famous Chanson triste: the Italians tend to profess great suffering to manipulate the beloved into acquiescence, or just to let off steam in a cathartic outcry – name any Italian opera. But the Spanish love song is sung by a strong, wounded, isolated character in the throes of a destructive passion. The lovers in Granados’s El mirar de la maja cannot bear to look at each other, because her eyes burn with passion, “and with their burning passion, they destroy.” There is also a streak of the surreal and lurid in the poetic imagery – the girls treading the eyes of the sun in Iban al pinar, or the weeping lizards in El lagarto esta llorando. This deadly passion and surrealism can be seen in many other Spanish art forms, most recently in the films of Pedro Almodóvar, especially Law of Desire and Matador, with their obsessive, dreamlike arc of love and death.

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