This evening’s program might seem to be about authenticity, in the sense of being true to one’s roots. After hearing in the first half of the program how five French (or honorary French) composers imagined the Spanish “other”—to borrow a word popularized by Edward Said, a scholar of post-colonial studies—one might easily expect to encounter something akin to the “real thing” in the second half, with its focus on the works of five Cuban composers.
To be sure, few of the composers featured in the first half had any actual experience of Spain and its global empire, which included Cuba until 1898, but this only fueled their fascination. Throughout the 19th century, French composers, writers, and artists invented an idea of Spain that bore little resemblance to any place in particular, which they inflected with their own fantasies (and fears). One of the main sites of such invention was opera, where backdrops, costumes, and instruments—especially castanets!—helped to create a convincing atmosphere, even when the music itself sounded only vaguely Spanish. As we shall hear, in some instances all it took to evoke a supposedly “Spanish” sound was a whiff of chromaticism (piquant notes outside a piece’s “home” tonality) and a whisper of a traditional dance rhythm.
But if the Spain of the first half of the program is mostly imaginary, so too is that of the second half. The works we hear after the interval were composed at a time when Cuban composers were seeking to define their new nation’s identity in musical (and sometimes more-than-musical) terms. Throughout the first few decades of the 20th century, fierce debates broke out among Cuban composers and musicologists about how their musical culture had come to be, and which of its many influences—indigenous, Afro-Cuban, and Spanish—were worth recognizing in their national musical narratives.
Race (and racism) was at the heart of many of these debates. Although the Cuban republic formally espoused racial equality, in practice its society remained sharply divided along racial lines, Black versus white. Some—including Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, whose habanera “Tú” is on tonight’s program—went so far as to suggest that Spanish culture was superior, musically and especially morally, to Afro-Cuban culture. For Cuban composers, Spain was clearly much more than a place. For them as for the French, Spain was an idea—and an ideology.
Gioachino Rossini had only recently retired from his high-pressure career as an opera composer (most recently, in Paris) when he wrote the 12 songs that together make up the album Les soirées musicales. Perhaps it is no wonder, then, that traces of his operatic style can be found in these pieces, including the one that begins this program, “L’invito.” As in his operas, here too are colorful characters (Ruggiero and his beloved Eloisa, whom he invites to join him at a romantic rendezvous) and an evocative setting, which the song’s subtitle—bolero—suggests is somewhere in Spain. The traditional bolero can be both a song and a couples’ dance, the distinctive rhythms of which are evoked—not literally, but closely enough—in the opening phrases of both the piano and the voice.
Although he spent only the first few months of his life in the French Basque town in which he was born (to a Basque mother and a Swiss father), Maurice Ravel continued to feel a close connection to the extreme southwestern border region—and, by extension, to Spain—throughout his life. It would be easy to assume that it was his heritage that inspired Ravel to compose his “Chanson espagnole”; in fact, it is one of seven settings he submitted to the Moscow-based Maison du Lied’s 1910 folk-song competition, for which the organization supplied the same seven texts and vocal melodies to each composer-competitor. The provided text of the “Chanson espagnole” was in Galician (the regional dialect spoken in northwestern Spain), and its melody is full of sultry chromaticisms, which Ravel amplifies with unexpected harmonies of his own (often rolled from the bottom to the top of the piano, as if strummed on a guitar).
Similarly written to order, Ravel’s 1907 Vocalise-étude en forme de habanera originally appeared in a collection of self-consciously modern vocal exercises commissioned by Paris Conservatoire professor Amédée-Louis Hettich. Part of what made this piece “modern” was its use—in the piano part—of a rhythmic pattern derived from the habanera, a Cuban (and specifically Afro-Cuban) reinvention of the French contredanse (itself a reinvention of the English country dance) that had only made its way back to Western Europe in the 19th century. Against this rhythmic backdrop, the singer—liberated from all linguistic demands—explores a variety of virtuosic vocal techniques, including trills (or rapidly alternating notes), staccati (spiky short notes), and portamenti (slides).
Léo Delibes is best known for Lakmé, his 1883 opera that evokes its exotic setting—British-occupied India—by way of a familiar (and fairly generic) set of musical markers. So too does Delibes’s setting of “Les filles de Cadix,” a poem by the early 19th-century French author Alfred de Musset. Taking its cue from the text—which tells us that the girls of Cadiz like to dance the bolero—the piano refers to the traditional rhythm we have already heard in Rossini’s “L’invito,” while the voice suggests a Spanish style of singing with its colorful melodies, ecstatic trills, and nonsense syllables.
Much like Delibes, Jules Massenet is best known for his operas, several of which were set in far-away (or at least far-enough-away) Spain. As in these operas, dance rhythms do much to set the scene in Massenet’s mélodies “Chanson andalouse” and “Sévillana.” In “Chanson andalouse,” the piano repeats another rhythmic pattern that will by now be familiar: the habanera (which we heard in Ravel’s Vocalise-étude). With its many triplets, the voice occasionally strains against this rhythmic pattern, making us feel in our bones the bittersweetness described in the text. The title of the next song, “Sévillana,” calls to mind a flamenco-style song and dance of Andalusian origin. Stylistically speaking, flamenco was (and is) a highly variable genre, but something one often hears are cross-rhythms created by heel-stamping, hand-clapping, or finger-snapping. Massenet hints at these with the occasional off-beat accent, leaving the rest to our imagination.
Premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1855, Giuseppe Verdi’s grand opera Les vêpres siciliennes is set not in Spain, but in French-occupied Sicily in the late 13th century. In keeping with the conventions of grand opera, it is based on an actual historical event, known as the Sicilian Vespers. In 1282, Sicilian patriots (aided by the Spanish) successfully overthrew their French ruler and reestablished Sicilian(-Spanish) governance. In Verdi’s opera, this insurrection is planned by two characters who end up falling in love: Hélène, an Austrian duchess whose brother has been killed by the French, and Henri, a Sicilian patriot who only belatedly becomes aware that the despised French ruler is in fact his father. In true operatic fashion, Hélène and Henri are torn between their love—both romantic and filial in Henri’s case—and their duty to the Sicilian cause. When Hélène sings “Merci, jeunes amies,” she—but, crucially, not Henri—is already aware that their impending wedding will be the cue for the Sicilian uprising. Although it is described in the score as a Sicilienne (a song and dance type loosely associated with Sicily), its rhythmic profile bears a striking resemblance to the boleros we have now heard several times tonight—an ominous warning of the Sicilian-Spanish attack to come.
Spain signified something slightly different to each of the Cuban composers on tonight’s program. For Joaquín Nin, it was the site of his childhood musical training; its music would become his specialty, first as a pianist, later as a musicologist and composer. Vital to the preservation of early Spanish keyboard music, Nin also collected folk songs from around the country, including the 20 cantos populares españoles, and composed strikingly modern settings for them, thus making them his own even as he helped to keep Spain’s traditions alive.
For Ernesto Lecuona and Gonzalo Roig, Spain—and especially the Spanish zarzuela, a musical-theatrical genre that along with French and Italian opera had long dominated Cuba’s stages—was something to be resisted and reacted against. For one thing, the stories they told were distinctly Cuban, rather than Spanish, and as such they tended to end tragically (rather than with a wedding). Both Lecuona’s María la O and Roig’s Cecilia Valdés are based on the same source material, a novel about a beautiful mixed-race woman—María or Cecilia, depending on the zarzuela—who is spurned by the wealthy white man she loves and violently avenged by the free Black man who loves her. In the excerpts we hear, Lecuona’s María is forlorn whereas Roig’s Cecilia is defiant, but both are destined to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
For Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes, Spain represented racial purity. In his musicological writings, he flatly denied the influence of Afro-Cuban musicians on dance genres such as the habanera and the danzón, instead asserting their Spanish and indigenous Cuban origins. The musical-historical record has since been set straight, but his stylized habanera “Tú” (and Jorge Anckermann’s similarly stylized danzón “Flor de Yumurí,” written around the same time) are still much beloved, both at home and abroad—a reminder (as if any were needed at this point in the program) that we all hear what we want to hear.
—Sarah Fuchs