IC 72007 Booklet

Enrique GRANADOS
GOYESCAS
FALLA
Pièces
espagnoles
Ralph
Votapek
Manuel de
pianist
. ENRIQUE GRANADOS (1867-1916) ,
. MANUEL DE FALLA (1876-1946) ,
Everything,” wrote Tielhard de Chardin, “is the sum of the past and nothing is comprehensible except through its history.”
Certainly Spain - and her luscious, quixotic, rippling music - can only be approached
through her long and turbulent past. Throughout most of its history, Spain has felt itself isolated from the rest of Europe, primarily by the geographical barrier of the Pyrenees and its
proximity to North Africa... The emotional isolation, more subtle, less directly definable,
derives in large measure from the Moorish occupation which lasted for more than seven centuries. Though the Moors were finally driven out by reconquest of Granada in 1492, their
influence lingered on for another century in physical actuality, and far longer by implication
in every aspect of its culture. Equally complicating was the African connection, as Spain was
Europe’s most direct link to that continent. Though the essence of Spain can only be understood against the back-story of Christian Europe, the impact and legacy of the fact of Muslim
Spain was decisive in forming the Spanish character and the evolution of Spanish art and its
forms. Literature and drama, painting and architecture, all forms of music, bear indelible
witness to the Moorish influence.
National unification was always difficult in Spain partly due to its heterogeneous population, and additionally due to the stubborn individualism of Spaniards themselves. Spaniards
being Spaniards, the greater the resistance to their conception of themselves, the stronger
their own pride and conviction grew. Hence Spain’s many regions, long resistant to any
attempts to weld them together, remained separated and in opposition to each other, a state
that Spaniards seem to accept fatalistically.
That Spanish music was infused by the sensuality and charm of the Moorish and African
cultures at various levels was inevitable but not ultimately determinate. The essence of the
Spanish character - the vigorous individuality, the dark sense of drama, the emotional fervor is best distilled in Spanish folk song and dance, which found its way into all aspects of
Spanish music, popular, liturgical, or “serious.” This was especially true in the Spanish
“renaissance” in music which, like it’s English equivalent, was a notable manifestation of the
–2–
“second generation” of romantic nationalism in music that came late in the nineteenth century throughout most of Europe. In both cases the impetus came from the complementary
forces of folk music and a rediscovery of the music of the national past.
The force of the use of folk music was a decisive one from a “nationalistic” point of view
of such composers as Vaughn Williams, Bartók, Janacek, Smetana and Sibelius. But the very
strength and distinctiveness of Spanish folk music, however, was a danger for less powerfully
talented composers. Its striking turns of melody and rhythm, its picturesque qualities with
their superficial appeal to non-Spaniards made it all too easy to draw upon it for surface
effects and glib coloration. Much Spanish national music is too obviously of the picture-postcard variety precisely because of the nature of the folk music from which it is too enthusiastically drawn.
It is important to distinguish between folk art and nationalist art, for the difference is crucial in understanding why Grieg, Bartók, Janacek and other nationalist composers produced
lasting universal art, while their less gifted peers did not. Folk art has a domestic, localized
aim and appeal; a national art – a universal and objective one. The truly nationalist artist is
more attuned to the national spirit in all its facets than mere folk or domestic art, though that
tuning and the emotional and intellectual penetration it postulates are less obvious and usually widely appreciated. Because Spanish folk song remained alive and active in contemporary Spanish life (while English song had faded from common use centuries before) the
temptation to access its highly distinctive coloration and rhythms as found in flamenco
dances and folk operas (zarzuelas) was irresistible to many though scorned by the country’s
“serious” composers led by Falla.
Yet the major composers in every case, Falla in Spain, Vaughn Williams in England, Bartók
in Hungary, Janacek in Moravia, though deeply aware of the folk inheritance, seldom used
actual folk material, and then only in its broadest and least obvious sense. It was an informing spirit rather than an immediate source; an idiom of speech rather than a precise syntax
and vocabulary copied direct from nature. Vaughn Williams rarely used folk material, and
Bartók drew further away from the Magyar material as he grew older. Falla and Granados in
particular believed that folk music is best cultivated by the educated musician who does not
use it directly, but transforms its spirit into something original and independent.
–3–
Enrique Granados
Though laced with Spanish folk elements, Granados’
style, rooted in the late-Romantic idiom, seems conservative compared to that of his contemporaries, Manuel de
Falla and Isaac Albéniz. And yet he lived and worked in
a forward looking period for the arts of Spain, which
was particularly evident in Barcelona where he spent
most of his adult life.
Born to an army captain and his wife in 1867 in
Lleida, Spain, he eventually moved with his family to
Barcelona where, in about 1874, he began piano and
musical studies with local pedagogues, including Filipe
Pedrell, the leading Spanish musicologist of the day,
with whom he subsequently studied composition and
harmony. Often criticized for his failure to instill his
piano students with solid technique, Pedrell was
nonetheless credited with initiating the nineteenth cenEnrique Granados
tury “Spanish musical renaissance” by transcribing hundreds of regional folk tunes, which he encouraged his
students such as Granados, Albéniz, and Ricardo Viñes, Spain’s foremost pianist, to integrate
into their own sharply defined musical personalities. But regardless of such efforts, serious
music students knew a complete education was impossible in Spain.
Upon the death of his father, the teenaged Enrique was forced to cease lessons until a
wealthy Barcelona businessman hired him to teach his children privately for a sum princely
enough to support his further studies at home and abroad. In September 1887, the 20-yearold Granados left his homeland for the French capital.
The precise impact of this Parisian period on the young composer remains unclear as
French music itself was in a period of transition. Still under the influence of the FrancoBelgian school led by Cesar Franck and Vincent D’Indy, ‘Impressionism’ had yet to achieve its
full height. Still, he met many bright young ‘lights’ of the day, including Ravel, Albéniz, Falla
and Viñes. He also forged lasting contacts with the more conservative French composers,
though he was never really attracted to French modernism as was his compatriot Albéniz.
Rather, his mature style would always lean toward late-Romantic wandering chromaticism,
virtuosic flair and thematic reminiscence.
–4–
Determined to make a career as a pianist, he returned to Barcelona in 1889 with high
hopes and a series of dance scores under his arm. His Danzas españolas, the first of which
were published in 1890, won him considerable praise and international recognition as a significant new concert pianist and interpreter of Spanish music. Shortly after that he met
Amparo Gal y Loberas, daughter of a Valencian businessman; their courtship and subsequent
marriage in 1893, followed by the birth of the first of their six children would precipitate
what most historians refer to as “the long silence” of this still nascent light in his country’s
music.
Scholars don’t know much about his next five years. They were spent largely in Madrid
where, ever in need of cash to support his growing family, he seems to have performed many
concerts and recitals. It was the appearance of his first opera, Maria del Carmen, produced
in Madrid in 1898, that Granados first achieved significant national success. Though it was
dropped from the repertoire within a few years (Spanish audiences still preferred European
operatic works), it did initiate the composer’s detour into the sometimes lucrative Catalan
lyric theater, for which he produced a number of lyric theater pieces, all forgettable but excellent fodder for his best work yet to come.
The year 1900 found him re-established in Barcelona where he founded a classical concert
society, for which he frequently conducted and performed as soloist. He also began his own
music school, the Academia Granados, which became an important venue for his own prestigious profile as a pianist, as well as chamber concerts in which he regularly performed with
such luminaries as Thibaud, Saint-Saëns and Casals.
It was a visit to the Prado in Madrid to see the tapestry exhibition of Francisco Goya
(1746-1828), portraying the colorful “majas” and “majos” of his day (girls and boys of questionable social origin and character), that would inspire the pianist’s best remembered work,
a suite of six pieces he titled Goyescas. Goyescas was composed in 1911, and given it’s first
performance in 1912 to great critical and popular acclaim. Encouraged by this success, he reworked the idea into an opera, also entitled Goyescas, which New York’s Metropolitan Opera
offered to premiere on January 28, 1916 if he would agree to oversee the production.
Accompanied by his wife, Granados arrived in New York to find himself admired and feted as
the first important Spanish composer to visit the U.S. Although he enjoyed the attention, he
found the rehearsals frustrating and the unfavorable comparisons to Bizet’s Carmen, quite disheartening. Invited by President Woodrow Wilson to perform his own works at a White
House dinner in his honor, he delayed his return to Spain to attend. Granados finally left the
United States a few days later, but while crossing the English Channel on the journey’s last
leg, their steamship, the Sussex, was torpedoed by a German submarine. Though the ship did
–5–
not sink, Granados and his wife were, along with others, thrown into the water. Lifeboats
soon picked up most, including Granados, but upon seeing his wife Amparo still struggling
in the choppy sea, he dove in to save her - both drowned on March 24, 1916.
Nearly a century later, Goyescas still remains as the fullest expression of Granados’ compositional genius - highly visual and intensely emotive. Perhaps because of their history, or perhaps because of their strange hybrid of racial and ethnic heritages, there is at the heart of all
Spaniards that certain alienation, fragmentation, despair and anger that no other artist has
captured so truly as Goya. His subjectivity, his elevation of the artist’s vision over all rules
and dogma (which lies at the heart of all modern art), accounts for the shock of recognition
Granados felt on first encountering Goya’s work. “In Goyescas,” wrote the composer later, “I
intended to give a personal note, a mixture of bitterness and grace.... that are typically
Spanish; and a sentiment suddenly amorous and passionate, dramatic and tragic.” So seminal
was this experience that he seemed quite unable not to write these luscious, dark and moody
pieces demanding the fullest of virtuoso techniques.
Though it is commonly agreed that the piano suite originally consisted of six pieces,
Granados himself is known to have played El pelele (The Straw Mannequin) as an introductory piece in concert, as Mr. Votapek does here on this CD. El pelele is actually the opening
sequence of the Granados opera Goyescas. It depicts the Spanish tradition of evening walkabouts, twilight strolls along Madrid’s broad avenues at which time the majas would openly
indulge in teasing and other “girl talk” as they walked among the street fairs. Goya, always
an ardent admirer of these comely young women, recorded this common entertainment in
the famous painting El pelele, which depicts four majas tossing a life sized straw dummy of a
rejected suitor on a blanket. Charming in tone and pianistically clever, it offers a delightful
appetizer to the more complex works to follow. Los requiebros (Flattery), the next piece in the
suite, is based on a well-known tune and is a supremely difficult piece of melodies roving
between two hands in double notes. The main jota dance theme starts and stops, demanding
a keen grasp of the piece’s fragmented structure. In Colquio en la reja (Love Duet), Granados
conjures the particularly hot Spanish ardor of Goya’s street people to express the passion possible between man and woman. Hear in the melody, the ardent tones of an impassioned
human voice pining against the plucked and strummed guitar string idioms in the piano’s
bass notes. El fandango de candil (Fandango by Candlelight), shifts moods again to seduce us
with its alluring fandango rhythm and rich, elegant harmonic undertow. Quejas, ó la maja y
el ruiseñor (The Maiden and the Nightingale), is a lush Romantic improvisation, the most celebrated of the set. Listen for the nightingale to burst forth, wrote the composer, “with the
jealousy of a wife, not with the sadness of a widow.” The longest and most dramatic - and
–6–
therefore essential piece of the set, El amor la muerte: Balada (Love and Death-Ballade),
demands from the pianist every technical facility available, including exquisite control of the
pedals, and an ability to keep a firm grasp on the complex structure while also indulging in
dizzying flights of imagination. Epilogo (The Ghost’s Serenade), offers the perfect conclusion
to this exhausting tour through Spain’s eighteenth century underworld. Listen as one of the
many skeletal characters, both humorous and eerie, which lurks in Goya’s dark alleys, strums
an old, fading melody of farewell.
When Earnest Newman described this piece as “the finest written-out improvisation,” he
laid bare the essence of Granados, whose best work usually emerged in a white heat of inspiration at the piano with little further refinement of ideas. Certainly his greatest gift was a
fine tuned ear for melody, which he refracted through an acute visual sensibility paralleling
Goya’s own inimitable vigorous, almost violent style. In both painter and composer we find
a microcosm of that historical and spiritual enigma, the Spanish character.
Manuel de Falla
Born in Cadiz on September 23, 1876 to a Valencian businessman and his wife, Manuel de
Falla began music lessons with his mother, an accomplished pianist. They always played
Austro-Germanic standards as well as symphony and opera transcriptions in four hand editions, a practice that would accelerate his later progress. When the family moved to Madrid
in 1896, he enrolled in the local conservatory where he studied with the composer Felipe
Pedrell and pianist José Tragó. Falla completed the seven-year course in two years in the
hope that he could begin to support himself and earn enough money to go to Paris to study.
For musicians in late nineteenth century Spain, the easiest route to Paris was to be found
through zarzuelas, lyric operettas endemic to Spain for centuries. These were light, sometimes even glib fare that the Spanish could not live without - despite their seemingly “low
class” appeal. Alternately described as graceful and enjoyable, shallow and vulgar, these
entertainments provided ready income to a composer in a country where no other living via
music could be made at the time. The racy humor, juicy gusto and the frequent raffish satire
of the best zarzuelas found no compatible echo in Falla’s austere temperament, but they did
provide a historical and cultural background from which he would later draw sumptuous
resources. Financial necessity compelled Falla to compose five of them over the course of his
lifetime to popular approbation and a steady flow of royalties.
Armed with cash and two competition wins, one in piano performance and the other in
opera composition, Falla was finally, at age 30, able to go to Paris in 1907. Knowing no one,
–7–
but knowing exactly who he wanted to meet, he
appeared at the house of composer Paul Dukas and
introduced himself. The older man received him and
his work with enthusiasm and accepted him as a private
student on the spot. Soon Falla found himself welcomed into a close circle of remarkable friends, including Ravel, Albéniz, Fauré, Debussy, Satie and Spanish
virtuoso pianist Riccardo Viñes, who would later debut
many piano works of his compatriots. Surrounded by
such enthusiasm and support, it was only a few months
before he had completed his Pièces espagnoles, (Four
Pieces for piano), in which we see a first glimmer of the
homage to the Spanish character, in all its fierce pride
and individualism, that would always mark his work.
Falla’s compositions were always very personal, and, in
their subtle counterpoint and rhythmic freedom, their
tonal ambiguity and modal feelings, they would ever
resonate of the austere and often aesthetic world in
which he was most comfortable - and productive.
While in Paris he was able to perfect his gifts to a
much higher degree than was possible in Spain.
Drawing of Manuel de Falla by
Through his constant association with various French
M. Larionov
composer friends, he learned techniques of orchestration and, perhaps most importantly, how to listen to, sift through, and transmogrify folk
tunes into a work so as to offer only the aroma, feeling, and spirit of his native land, rather
than a literal translation. Although he was hardly the drawing room type, his discretion,
intelligence and his immense talent inspired sympathetic response, and he lacked for nothing. Within the year he had published several works and completed his first major opera, La
Vida Breve. Written in 1905 it was finally presented in Paris in 1911 to considerable popular
acclaim, though with a little less enthusiasm from the critics. Nonetheless, his career as a
serious Spanish composer was well assured when he returned to Madrid in 1914 - with the
intention to continue composing and to help nourish Spanish music.
Over the next 25 years, Falla based himself in the Spanish capital but made frequent forays
to Granada and other cities where he wrote and supervised several lyric theater pieces. He
continued to compose significant pieces for piano and chamber ensembles and in the early
–8–
1920s he founded the Orquestra Bética de Camara. This handpicked ensemble, which he
directed and polished until it was suitable for classical as well as contemporary works,
enjoyed a satisfying relationship for many years.
As time passed, however, he found himself increasingly ill and depressed. When Franco
initiated the terrible chaos of what would become the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Falla’s
health deteriorated quickly, and his status as an intellect and an artist seemed endangered. A
deeply religious man, Falla was profoundly disturbed by the Republic’s persecution of the
Catholic Church and eventually retreated to Granada with his sister Maria del Carmen to
wait out the 30 months of the war. By its end, the country was in ruins and many intellectuals had fled or met with violent deaths - and yet another world war was clouding the horizon.
When Falla was invited to conduct a series of concerts devoted to his music in Buenos Aires,
he reluctantly accepted and traveled to Argentina in 1939. But once there, doctors insisted
that his frail physical and emotional condition necessitated an immediate retreat to the
mountains. And so it was that what began as a rest cure, slowly evolved into a quiet exile.
In 1941 he and his devoted sister Maria settled into a Spartan existence in the tiny village of
Alta Garcia, in the province of Córdoba, where he pondered much and wrote little, until his
death from cardiac arrest on November 14, 1946.
Although the Pièces espagnoles, are among his earliest compositions, they show a clearly
defined personality at work along with a highly polished technique, reminiscent of Albéniz in
his later years. Composed at the same time as Albéniz’s Iberia, these Pièces espagnoles represented a high point of Spanish nationalism via a lighter, less note-heavy approach. In
Argonesa, he maintains the rhythm of a jota, or folk tune, which holds its sparkling theme
together throughout the development and into the dovetailing of the second theme which
follows. Cubana’s rhythmical beat and languorous sonorities charm and cajole even as they
incite an almost irresistible urge to dance. In Montañesa, Falla breaks character with its
vague, misty distances that stretch endlessly into a valley of a night in the Castilian mountains, punctuated by drifting cattle bells with the occasional twinkling star. And then there’s
Andaluza, with its spiked-heel rhythms and gypsy melismos most often associated with Spain
but which in reality come from roaming peoples of Andalusia. Here we find the essence of
what it means to be a rugged Spaniard: proud, vigorous, fiercely independent - always moving to a national rhythm.
© 2001 Lynnda L. Greene
–9–
. Ralph Votapek Biography ,
Ralph Votapek was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1939 and at the age of nine, began his musical studies at the Wisconsin Conservatory. He studied at Northwestern University with Guy
Mombaerts, earning his Bachelor’s Degree, and subsequently attending both the Manhattan and the
Juilliard School of Music. Although his principal teachers were Rosina Lhevinne and Robert
Goldsand, he also studied with Nadia Reisenberg and Rudolf Serkin. In 1959, he won the
Naumburg Award which offered him a New York debut at Town Hall. Mr. Votapek skyrocketed to
world prominence when he won the Gold Medal at the first Van Cliburn International Piano
Competition in 1962. The prize brought with it a cash award of $10,000, headlines around the world,
a Carnegie Hall debut recital, a contract with famed impresario Sol Hurok, and an RCA Victor recording contract.
Since 1962, Mr. Votapek has maintained a versatile and remarkable performance and recording
career. Following the Van Cliburn Competition, Votapek had tremendous success in London with the
Philharmonia Orchestra and was hailed for his performances across the United States. In 1966, he
made his first tour of South America, where he has performed in countless venues including Buenos
Aires’ famous Colon Theatre. Mr. Votapek has a special commitment to South America, where he has
toured every other year for the past three decades. In August 1997, the Buenos Aires Herald said,
“Votapek, now in his fifties, keeps his characteristic boyishness; handsome, dynamic and ingratiating,
he communicates easily. Artistically he is as consistent as they come; a rock-solid technique, a
catholicity of taste that knows no bounds, and beautifully varied and interesting programs. You’ll
never be disappointed in a Votapek recital.” In 2001 he will make his 19th concert tour of South
America.
He has appeared with virtually every major American orchestra and has been partnered by such
legendary conductors as Rafael Kubelik, William Steinberg, Joseph Krips, Erich Leinsdorf and Arthur
Fiedler. He has been guest soloist sixteen times with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and has also
appeared frequently with the orchestras of; Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Philadelphia,
Washington D.C., Boston, Saint Louis, Houston, Dallas, Louisville, San Antonio and Memphis.
Equally at home in Chamber music, Mr. Votapek has performed with the Juilliard, Fine Arts, New
World and Chester String Quartets. The PBS television network and other educational stations draw
frequently on Mr. Votapek’s video series of over forty recitals broadcast throughout the U.S.
Mr. Votapek has held the title of Artist-in-Residence at Michigan State University for over 30 years.
– 10 –
. CREDITS ,
Recorded at the WFMT Studios, Chicago, May 13-14, 2001.
Recording Engineer: Lawrence Rock
Editor: Jennifer Trasczynski
Executive and Mastering Producer: Michael Rolland Davis
Mastering Engineer: Ed Thompson
Piano: Steinway & Sons, New York
Cover Photo: Peter Schaaf
Liner Notes: Lynnda L. Greene
Design: Samskara, Inc.
To place an order or to be included on mailing list:
Ivory Classics® • P.O. Box 341068 • Columbus, Ohio 43234-1068
Phone: 888-40-IVORY or 614-761-8709 • Fax: 614-761-9799
[email protected] • Website: http://www.IvoryClassics.com
– 11 –
GRANADOS - GOYESCAS
FALLA - PIÈCES ESPAGNOLES
RALPH VOTAPEK - PIANIST
ENRIQUE GRANADOS
MANUEL DE FALLA
Goyescas - Los Majos enamorados
Pièces espagnoles
(The Young Men in Love)
1
2
3
El pelele (The Straw Mannequin) 4:34
I. Los requiebros (Flattery)
8:12
II. Coloquio en la reja
10:34
III. El fandango de candil
6:17
(Candlelight Fandango)
5
V. El amor y la muerte: Balada 12:05
(Love and Death: Ballade)
7
10
Aragonesa
Cubana
Montañesa
Andaluza
2:53
3:36
4:11
3:54
Total Disc Time - 70:42
IV. Quejas, ó la maja y el ruiseñor 6:20
(The Maiden and the Nightingale)
6
9
11
(Conversation through the Bars)
4
8
VI. Epilogo: Serenata del espectro 7:14
Producer: Michael Rolland Davis
Engineer: Ed Thompson
Original 24-Bit Master
(Epilogue: The Ghost Serenade)
2001 Ivory Classics® • All Rights Reserved.
64405-72005 STEREO
Ivory Classics® • P.O. Box 341068
Columbus, Ohio 43234-1068 U.S.A.
®
Phone: 888-40-IVORY or 614-761-8709 • Fax: 614-761-9799
[email protected] • Website: www.IvoryClassics.com