Echoes of Spain
“I don’t believe any other country has a Spanish musical literature as rich and original as France. A Frenchman, by virtue of lineage and sensitivity, is a more perceptive observer of Spain than a German, an Anglo-Saxon, or a Slav.”
René Chalupt: “L’Espagne dans la musique française”, La Revue musicale, no. 123 (February 1932)
In the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Napoleonic Empire to the French Third Republic, French intellectuals and artists were deeply drawn to Spain and to the exoticism they perceived in our country. From Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne (1843) to Jean Cocteau’s La corrida du 1er mai (1957), including Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), numerous works attest to this fascination with all things Spanish. Musically speaking, France not only recreated and paraphrased the sounds of our popular traditions, but also warmly welcomed the composers and performers who crossed the Pyrenees. The four most representative figures of what has been historically called Romantic and Post-Romantic Spanish nationalism—Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, and Joaquín Turina—all studied and lived in Paris, where they shared salons and concert stages with the great French composers of the day: Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Fauré, and Ernest Chausson, among others. These five French composers in particular attended the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, a pivotal event in the rise of Hispanism in France. At that time, everything Spanish was in vogue in Paris. As poet and critic René Chalupt wrote, “Spain may take pride not only in its own music—rooted in a uniquely rich popular tradition and elevated by universally admired masters—but also in the fraternal echoes that this music has inspired in French composition.”
France, however, was not the only nation seduced by Spanish folklore. Russian artists also took great interest in it. As José Ortega y Gasset noted, Russia and Spain are “the two poles of Europe’s great diagonal,” serving as hinges between the Western and Eastern worlds—and this subtle, invisible thread connecting them remains intact to this day. In the 1830s and 1840s, after Napoleon’s defeat, the Spanish cause found widespread sympathy in Slavic lands, fostering a proliferation of Spanish-inspired songs in the bourgeois salons of Russia—particularly boleros. Mikhail Glinka’s well-known journey to Spain, where he resided from 1845 to 1847, marked a defining moment in the musical dialogue between the two nations. The composer even remarked that certain Spanish songs reminded him of Russian folk music. His observations came from direct experience, as he traveled extensively throughout the Iberian Peninsula: “Spain is unlike other European regions: each province is markedly different from the others. That’s why travelers often describe the country inaccurately, judging the whole by its parts.” Let us not forget that Glinka was the founder of the Russian school of composition, and the Spanish elements he introduced would influence subsequent generations of Russian composers such as Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Mily Balakirev, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Other notable hispanophiles include writer Alexander Pushkin, novelist Pyotr Boborykin, geologist and geographer Pyotr Chikhachov, and painter Maria Bashkirtseff, all of whom visited Spain.
This passion for southern picturesque themes—especially among French artists—focused largely on Andalusia and its stereotypically exotic imagery: bandits, gypsies, smugglers, bullfights, joie de vivre, carnal seduction, fervent religiosity, architecture, humble village life, and flamenco singing, all of which became perceived throughout Europe as quintessentially Spanish. Thus, the South—both real and imagined—came to represent all of Spain, a generalization that Glinka himself lamented. Miguel de Unamuno scornfully referred to this process as the “southernization of Spain.” Consequently, the musical archetypes of Spanishness, beyond just the titles of works, were rooted primarily in Andalusian popular sonorities (cante jondo and flamenco) with their Arabic influences. These clichés evoke richly ornamented melodies full of trills, embellishments, and extensive melismas; ostinato rhythmic patterns; modal harmonies and popular rhythms such as fandango, seguidilla, jota, and habanera; as well as the use of the augmented second interval and the “Andalusian cadence.” In orchestral scores, one finds frequent evocations of Arab-Hispanic wind instruments, the use of sleigh bells, castanets, and tambourines in the percussion section, and guitar imitations in the strings.
The well-established Lago-Navarro piano duo—formed in 1997 by Spanish pianists Juan Lago and Belén Navarro—presents in this album a repertoire that has featured prominently in their concerts over the past decade: works by non-Spanish composers inspired by Spanish popular music. This foreign gaze upon Spain takes the form of four renowned orchestral works presented here in four-hand piano arrangements. In the cases of Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, the composers themselves prepared the four-hand piano versions. Debussy’s Ibéria was transcribed by his friend and collaborator André Caplet, while Emmanuel Chabrier’s España was arranged for four hands by the esteemed opera composer André Messager. Yet it is important to note that most of these works were originally conceived as pieces for two pianos before being orchestrated.
