Elogio de la guitarra

The association of classical music for guitar with Spanish music is just as much of a popular superficiality as the simple equation of Spanish music with Andalusian folklore. In actual fact, a significant amount of Spanish folk and art music is of Catalonian or Castilian origin, and the important composers of the Spanish national school that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, with one exception, wrote no guitar music at all. Nonetheless this undifferentiated and vague association does rest on an element of truth that manages to hold its own over against all the facts of music history: no matter the variety and wealth of the whole of Spanish folk music and the impossibility of producing a precise distillation of its elements, it is the ancient Andalusian vocal art of the cante jondo that musicians and hearers have always found to be the most fascinating, and it is the guitar that accompanies this art.

Today the cante jondo (»low song«) is subsumed under flamenco, a term gradually blurring its roots and limits, but in its origins it is very much related to Arab and Indian music, to the first »world music.« The primordial dramatic quality of this song has retained something of a cultural »cradle of humanity,« of an original expression of the never-ending human struggle for survival, suffering, and love. This was the expressive world that fascinated Russian composers of the nineteenth century, among them Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov, about Spain and later left even deeper, more noticeable traces in the work of Debussy and Ravel.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946), the outstanding and most influential Spanish composer of the twentieth century, penetrated more than anyone else before him into the true nature of the cante jondo and transformed it for modern art music. In his writing he referred to the latent modernity of the characteristic songlike melismas and modulations (finest pitch and tone-color changes of the voice), and in his music he brought about a congenial assimilation of the tradition material.The guitar is the only instrument that finds a place in Andalusian folk music and in Central European concert music. As such, it is a sort of symbol of cross-cultural encounter, but Falla, who spoke fondly of the toque jondo (»low playing«) and praised its tonal facets, wrote only the two-page Homenaje (Le Tombeau de Debussy) for this instrument. This piece from 1920 is the only exception to the »guitar boycott« in the work of the famous phalanx of Pedrell-Albéniz-Granados-Falla and at the same time an undeniable point of reference for subsequent guitar compositions of our century.This guitar piece represents a crystallization of the most multilayered and striking musical substance. Its »only- child« status would be even more regrettable if not for the guitar oeuvre of Joaquín Rodrigo (b. 1902), Falla's legitimate continuator and heir. It remained for Rodrigo and Joaquín Turina (1882-1949), Falla's companion for many years, to complete the triumph of the Andalusian element in Spanish music of the twentieth century as well as to compose a representative repertoire in this style for the classical guitar. Significantly enough, Turina's few guitar works contribute the most to his current fame.Joaquín Rodrigo's fame has something of the irony of fate and of the paradox to it, for it is he who created one of the most-cited musical motifs of all times, no matter what only the fewest music-consumers may connect with his name and work: the theme from the adagio of the Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra of 1939. While this undisputed stroke of genius - also in reference to the guitar repertoire - achieved a popularity completely removed from its origins and took on independent mythic status, the actual overall oeuvre of the composer seems to be condemned to lead an obscure existence.Rodrigo has made contributions to almost all the genres of orchestral, chamber, and vocal music with great and by no means random productivity and has continued along the lines of the marked tonal idiom of Falla and the neoclassical Stravinsky to develop his own unmistakable individual style. This style combines the omnipresent primal force of the cante jondo and the characteristic flamenco dance rhythms with the counterpoint and formal discipline of the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to form a completely organic synthesis. These seemingly diametrically opposed musical worlds have in common what is at times an extreme expressivity of the reduction to the essential, the absence of any and all romantic sweetness in the interest of the noble beauty of the sparing, harsh, and clear.

The melismas conjured up, obsessive and ritual character of the rhythms of the polo and the sevilliana with their typical 6/8-3/4 reinterpretation, insistent circling and plumbing of the inexhaustible Phrygian church mode along with the stark colors of unresolved and unresolvable dissonances - all this comes together to form its own cosmos, one in tune with itself.Over the long period of Rodrigo's composing, his music has achieved so much of the status of self-containedness that it no longer can be categorized in terms of stylistic epochs or with labels such as »folkloric« or »classical« but seems to be completely timeless, something that has always existed and possesses finality.

Although, as emphasized at the beginning, the guitar repertoire is in no way richly blessed with pieces in which the Andalusian pulse really makes itself felt, of Rodrigo's diverse solo works only the Fandango, En los trigales, and recently Invocación y danza have established themselves in performance practice. Others such as En tierras de Jerez are virtually unknown. Whatever the cause of this disproportion may be, it does not lie in the quality of the works, which is excellent.

Those who love the guitar cannot help being overwhelmed time and time again by the characteristic playing styles of the flamenco virtuosos and will find the logical stylized adaptation of these styles for classical guitar only in Rodrigo's works. Here techniques of high virtuosity such as rasgueado chords, fast scales, as well as tremolo in the right hand and complex ornamentation in the left hand far removed from any clichés or any mere showiness are employed in the manner of a sovereign tonal idiom permeated by a dynamic of artistic design. This is all the more astonishing in that the composer, who has been blind since the age of three, does not play the guitar but is inspired by his deep understanding of its »idea.«

Falla called for not only the quotation of the music of the folk but also the incorporation and rendering audible of its spirit and the unmistakable nature of the landscape and its inhabitants. This demand is fulfilled in special measure in the pieces of the imaginary suite Por los campos de España. I have chosen four of these pieces. Their titles immediately suggest vivid associations.Zarabanda lejana, an orchestral work of impressionistic tonality, became Rodrigo's first guitar work by way of transcription in 1926. It is a bow before a great epoch of Spanish music from the sixteenth century. In the Fandango, the Zapateado, and the third movement of the Elogio, the Spanish past of Domenico Scarlatti and Padre Antonio Solér is rendered present. The Tres piezas on the whole bring baroque models to life in the guise of Spanish rhythms and tunes - and vice versa.

Elogio de la guitarra from the 1970s has the design of a sonata. It offers us an opportunity to hear how the mature, lucid Rodrigo looks back in a festive mood at the whole mastery of his previous music for guitar. Invocación y danza was composed for a competition in 1960. It has long since been recognized as the towering high point of the modern guitar literature and a congenial continuation of Falla's Homenaje.

Owing to their difficulty, Rodrigo's pieces are often submitted to abridgment or revision, which quite quickly takes away from their substance. Since the composer is still living, I proceed on the basis of his agreement with the published editions. A revised edition of Invocación y danza has appeared recently. I have combined its informative, certainly original material with the solutions of the time-honored Alirio Díaz version. In the case of Elogio de la guitarra the original text is available with a to-be-neglected alternate version. As in the case of previous recordings, I have taken care to pay proper attention to the intentionality of the special character of each single note from the inspiration of a master as well as the laws of composition.

I had a certain set sound in my ear for these recordings for a long time and wanted to realize it with the assistance of a guitar maker whom I can trust. The instrument employed here was completed by Francesco Santiago Marín in Granada just prior to the recording so that I just had time to pick it up - a genuinely inappropriate hectic pace and fast-lane life in view of the long periods of time through which Rodrigo has lived.

By virtue of his extraordinary vocation and vitality this small blind man has accompanied our whole century with his wonderful existence. It is with thanks and reverence that we approach his hundredth birthday.

Frank Bungarten

Translated by Susan Marie Praeder