This is a past event
Chris Collins (Bangor University) will give the paper, European models for a Spanish opera: the special case of Falla’s La vida breve
European models for a Spanish opera: the special case of Falla's La vida breve
The first performance of Manuel de Falla's opera La vida breve in Nice in 1913 marked his arrival as a composer of international stature. The work was originally written in 1905 as the winning entry in a Madrid competition. Falla's declared intention was 'to create a Spanish opera in dramatic form, of which I could not find a single example in all Spanish musical theatre'. He was successful in this aim: contemporary reviews (including one by Ravel) praise the work both for its Spanishness and for its dramatic effect. But can it really be true that La vida breve had no national precedents, as Falla asserts? Given the vibrancy of the musical theatre tradition in Spain (especially in the popular form of the zarzuela) this claim seems at first glance indefensible. Yet a remarkable body of surviving documentary evidence – including manuscripts, diaries and Falla's personal library of scores – clearly demonstrates that Falla undertook no study of national models when composing the work. On the contrary, he turned exclusively to recent works by foreign composers, including Puccini's La Bohème (1896) and Tosca (1900), Massenet's Cendrillon (1899), Gustave Charpentier's Louise (1900), and, above all, Wagner's music dramas. This paper traces the influence of these foreign models on four features of the design of La vida breve: its external structure, aspects of the vocal writing style, its diagetic musical allusions, and its motivic fabric. From there, it explores how this compositional procedure set the pattern for the creation of the most characteristic feature of Falla's music: the articulation of a distinctive national voice against the ever-changing backdrop of mainstream European modernism.
- Speaker
- Chris Collins
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, Room 055