Transforming Nationalism in Spanish Music: From Cultural Expression to Propaganda (1898-1975)
Chair(s): William Craig Krause (Hollins University)
The session explores the intricate evolution of music nationalism in Spain, from its outset in the late nineteenth century to the death of dictator Francisco Franco. We approach Spanish nationalism as a mutable phenomenon shaped by various historical, political, and cultural factors. Following the loss of Spain’s last colonies as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the search for Spanish national identity became an existential concern, initially catalyzed by the intellectuals of the “Generation of '98” and subsequently adopted by composers and music critics. Beginning with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, music nationalism started to shift from a variegated form of cultural expression to a prescriptive tool of fascist propaganda under Franco’s regime. Franco’s ambiguous policies regarding the arts continued to exert diffuse control over a generation of avant-garde composers throughout the 1960s.
The first paper probes the discourse of the Spanish national opera at the crossroad of the centuries through a reassessment of Manuel Pennella's andalucista opera El gato montés (1917). The presenter identifies it as an example of Spanish operatic verismo, which he argues represents a plausible solution —other than the zarzuela chica— to the impasse of the ópera española narrative.
The second paper considers the centrality of humor to Manuel de Falla’s Castilian neoclassicism in an analysis of his puppet-opera, El retablo de maese Pedro (1922). The presenter suggests that Falla redefines stereotypical Spanish tropes through humor, transforming the musical image of Spain from one defined by the alterity of Spanish Romani toward Quixote’s comically tragic idealism.
The third paper discusses the evolution of the meaning of nationalism from the fascist policies of Franco’s regime in the 1940s, based on tradition, to the international avant-garde trends developed by the West in the 1960s. The presenter argues for the existence of a continuous, but transversal, meaning of Nationalism along with various initiatives intended by the government to promote musical modernism.
The session provides three different perspectives on Spanish music nationalism, framing them within their specific cultural and political context in a turbulent but fertile period in Spanish history.
Presentations of the Symposium
“More than a pasodoble.” Flamenquismo, Realism, and Verismo in Manuel Penella’s El gato montés
Alessio Olivieri
University of Nebraska - Lincoln
This paper analyzes Manuel Penella’s opera El gato montés (1917) within the general discourse on Spanish national opera at the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and as one of many cases in which alleged authenticity issues re-emerged in relation to Spanish musical folklore. Did Penella trade authenticity for marketability? Was the opera an “españolada”? Why did Penella deviate from light operetta (zarzuela chica) by composing such a unique work?
The conflicting reviews of Penella’s opera, especially by Catalan critics, confirm a widespread sentiment of antiflamenquismo that, despite not hindering the work’s success, reinforced the idea of a “popular” opera loosely associated with the género chico. Paradoxically, reviewers still accepted flamenquismo when it was employed as a couleur locale in the fashionable zarzuelas— further evidence of a perpetually controversial narrative on an ideal form of Spanish national musical theater, i.e., ópera española. Indeed, Penella strove to create an authentic Spanish opera. He set to music a realist story imbued with Spanish folklore and extensively used leitmotivs. Moreover, he wrote the libretto himself, employing an Andalusian idiom.
After reconstructing its controversial reception, I examine the opera through the lens of a renewed verismo model —which I argue is shared by several Spanish realist operas of the time— in its overall dramatic structure and in terms of leitmotivic development. Building upon the concept of “passionate fatalism” (Mitchell, 1990) and Andalusian emotionality as intertwining fate and freedom (Ortega y Gasset, 1914), I identify, in the opera, specific tropes of Andalusian culture. This allows the repositioning of the opera in the andalucismo discourse and demonstrates how Penella’s dramatic choices aimed for “theatrical realism” —one which finds a parallel in the verismo aesthetic— rather than triviality.
A re-assessment of the reception of El gato montés, together with a fresh approach to its dramatic and musical properties, provides new perspectives on a work that breaks the boundaries of both the zarzuela and the hybrid zarzuela-opera, while concurrently confirming a new model of realist opera in Spain, one that a handful of composers experimented in the 1890s and that strongly resonated with Italian verismo.
Spanish Nationalism, Neoclassicalism, and Comic (Dis)Enchantment in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro
Anthony LaLena
Eastman School of Music
Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro (1922), a one-act puppet opera based on an excerpt from Don Quixote, takes a decisive turn away from the Andalusian themes that defined his earlier work toward what critics have described as a more universal style. As Falla draws on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque sources, scholars have contextualized his neoclassicism in El retablo within the post-imperial discourse of interwar Spain that increasingly called upon Spanish Golden Age culture to negotiate a modern national identity (Hess, 2001; Torres Clemente, 2007; Christoforidis, 2018). While my analysis is informed by this research, in this paper I focus on the role of humor and its centrality to Falla’s “Castilian” neoclassicism. Inspired by the work of Henri Bergson (1900), and Sianne Ngai (2012), I develop a theory of neoclassical humor that centers on not solely what James Currie (2018) shows is a shared tendency of comedy and modernism to demystify artistic essences, but also on a quixotic vitality that animates Maese Pedro’s puppet theater.
Unlike Ravel’s musical automata or Stravinsky’s infamous claims of objectivity, Falla’s neoclassicism retains a Romantic expressiveness that I suggest emerges from Quixote’s incontinent idealism. To capture Quixote’s innate comic nature and develop his distinctive neoclassical humor, Falla explores the ambiguous transference between Quixote’s excessive vitality and the mechanization of Maese Pedro’s puppets as he collapses these two worlds. Falla’s foregrounding of Quixote’s admirable if foolish faith in the immaterial further situates El retablo within a discourse that sought to reshape modern Spanish identity after, as Miguel de Unamuno dubbed Quixote, this “Spanish Christ.” In sum, I demonstrate in this paper how Falla musically refines Quixote’s humor and piety to redefine typical Spanish tropes in a more universal manner, far away from the dominating presence of Carmen. Essential to his neoclassical style, I contend that those same features simultaneously preserve an albeit more subtle mark of Spanish alterity in the wake of neoclassicism’s “Latinate” aesthetics of purity, balance, clarity, and grace (Messing, 1988).
“Avant Garde music, but tradition”: The Constant and Ambivalent Use of Nationalism in the Music Culture of Franco’s Spain—from Autarchy in the 1940s to Spanish Developmentalism in the 1960s
Pedro López de la Osa
University of California - Riverside
During the 1940s, the first government in Franco’s dictatorship was allied with fascist ideology. Most government officials were members of the right-wing Falange, and their nationalistic cultural policies focused on “tradition.” The folklore from each part of the country, the Golden Age, the Spanish empire, and historical figures such as Don Quixote, the Catholic Kings, and El Cid were the emblems of culture that Spaniards were encouraged to embrace and to follow as several Spanish scholars have pointed out. In Western art music, Castilian folklore, in a Neoclassic musical style called Neocasticismo, became the canon. The Concerto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo is an excellent example of this.
On the other hand, during the 1960s, the government used the internationalization of Spain as a popular tourist destination and its new position in the international sphere (the result of support from Europe and the USA during the 1950s) as an opportunity to foster Western art-music culture both inside and outside the country as the Spanish scholar San Llorente has pointed out. Franco’s government now supported avant-garde music reflecting European trends in works by Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, and Maderna, as an attempt to renovate Spain’s image abroad. At the same time, they sponsored other musical initiatives, such as competitions, festivals, and orchestras, but without leaving the path developed during the 1940s. Thus, some of these events involving Western art music were aimed at a global audience, in order to promote tourism. In contrast, some other initiatives were directed at the Spanish public itself, and the music selected by the government followed the same path from the 1940s onward.
Through an intertextual analysis of different documents, I argue that the evolution of the meaning of nationalism—from the complex forms displayed by the repressive fascist policies of Franco’s regime, rooted in traditionalism, to the avant-garde manifestation of Spain’s anti-communist alliances during Cold War—had various implications, depending on the intended audience. This paper reveals that “nationalism,” in a variety of forms, was a thread running through the Spanish government’s cultural policies from the backward-looking 1940s to the apparently more progressive 1960s.
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