Falla y sus siete canciones populares

Siete Canciones Populares Españolas

Manuel de Falla y Matheu was a Spanish composer who along with Albeniz, Rodrigo, Granados and Turina, formed the nationalist Spanish school in the first half of the twenty century. His initial musical education was in charge of her mother and grandfather, both piano players. When he was a child his nanny use to sing him old nanas or lullabies and Spanish popular songs, this definitely make a mark in his future composition style.

He was very interesting in the flamenco and cante jondo of his country, both traditional music genres of the region of Andalusia and known for being very energetic, staccato and deep music styles. In June of 1922, Falla organized a festival with an especial focus on cante Jondo which turned to be a memorable series of flamenco performance that included many classical musicians, cultural and literary figures, including the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

His interest in the local musical traditions of Spain formed in him a composition style which was full of folklorist echoes. His inspiration was the tradition settled in the Spanish golden age but we can also perceive a neoclassic influence as a result of the years spent in Paris.

Some of his work suffered a lot or criticism and attacks of part of the music critics who questioned his expression of national identity and considered him incapable of distinguish between popular and serious genres. All this was the result of his love for the flamenco and other popular musical expressions.

Falla’s response to this was to write another explicitly Spanish work. In 1914 he finished the Siete Canciones Populares Españolas which, according to Michael Christoforidis, a musicologist specialized in Falla’s life and work, were “the most popular set of Spanish songs ever written”. Is in this work where Falla truly affirms his musical personality. The melodies that conformed the song cycle come from late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century printed sources, including Jose Inzenga’s Ecos de España, and Eduardo Ocon’s Coleccion de aires nacionales y populares.

Subtlety and simplicity are the songs’ most appealing features. Falla’s manage to create an elegant reinterpretation of the original sources and in a way, he illuminates their essential qualities. The harmonic structure of the songs emphasizes the romantic frustration and the torment that the original cante jondo is full of. In the songs we can sense the importance of the rhythm according to the tonality and the melodic intervals. His unique way to manage the undulations and cadences of the songs make them an ingenious imitation of what they originally set out to do. The songs were composed under the influence of the “natural music”. This idea came of Felipe Pedrell, a Spanish Catalan composer who stated in the preface of his Cancionero that the folksong should be based on ancient modes and not simply subject to the laws of major and minor modes.

The songs were presented in January 14 of 1915. The work had an enormous success and since then it had been transcribed many times for various musical mediums. This songs are also an example of the necessity of many composers from Romance and Slavonic nations that in that time, wanted to cast away of the Musical Germanic influence. The songs are a recovery of the ancient Spanish traditions and they are also part of the classical western tradition.