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Goldberg Magazine # 37 (12/2005)
Goldberg a cessé de publier
avec le # 54
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# 54 was the last issue.
THE PRESENCE OF DON QUIXOTE IN MUSIC... BEYOND THE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS
par
Begoňa
Lolo
On 26 September 1604, Cervantes was granted a royal privilege to print the
first part of his novel The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha;
barely three months later, in January 1605, the work was published. The
novel had checquered beginnings and few people believed it would be a
success. Since none of the prominent poets of the day was willing to write
the laudatory prologue and sonnets that were expected to accompany any work
worth its salt, the author himself was obliged to pen the burlesque verses
which appear in the introduction. We can gain a better understanding of the
circumstances surrounding the publication of what we now regard as one of
the great masterpieces of world literature from the opinion of the Spanish
playwright Lope de Vega, who wrote the following in a letter dated 14 August
1604:
“The least said about our poets, the better; in this respect, the new century can hardly be described as auspicious. Of all the budding poets, there is none so bad as Cervantes, nor any so foolish as to praise his Don Quixote.”
In spite of Lope’s scathing judgement, the book rapidly became a best-seller. Barely three weeks after it rolled off the press in Madrid, the printer Jorge Rodríguez obtained permission from the Holy Office of the Inquisition to bring out a second Spanish edition of the novel in Lisbon. Three editions appeared in Portugal during 1605, as well as a second edition printed in Madrid in March of that year, followed by a further two editions printed in Valencia. With six editions in the course of just one year and no fewer than 1500 copies printed on each occasion, the book was a runaway success whose popularity with the reading public has survived to this day.
The book’s triumph at home rapidly spread elsewhere in Europe, first in the
original Spanish and then in translation. The first English translation, by
Thomas Shelton, appeared in 1612, closely followed by César Oudin’s French
translation in 1614, an Italian translation by Lorenzo Francosini in 1622,
and a German translation in 1648 by Pasch Basteln von der Sohle, possibly
the pseudonym of Cäsar von Joachimsthal. Thanks largely to these
translations, the adventures of the gentle knight and his squire Sancho not
only amused and delighted a wide reading public, but also soon became a
source of inspiration for composers.
800 musical compositions
To date, there are over 800 musical compositions based on Don Quixote and
other literary works by Cervantes, making him the Spanish author who has
most inspired musicians1. The knight who goes by the name of Don Quijote,
Quixote, Chisciotte and all its other variants, and especially some of the
scenes from the novel, such as Camacho’s wedding, Sancho Panza and the
government of the Island of Barataria, the knight and his squire’s sojourn
at the Duke and Duchess’s castle and the Cave of Montesinos, to cite the
most representative, have served as the inspiration for the greatest number
of musical compositions. Among them there are two genres which, over the
centuries, have proved to be particularly hospitable to the Castilian
knight: ballet and lyric drama.
In the case of ballet, it is easy to see how the strong visual elements in the story afford a wealth of variety and colour in performance. The ballet genre is also heir to the great French musical tradition of ballet de cour, combining dance, récitative and air, which were performed by courtiers and even, on occasions, by the king himself together with other members of his family. From the very beginning of Don Quixote’s existence, France, more than any other country, has welcomed the figure of Alonso Quijano into its musical life. One early appearance was in Messrs Sautenir’s Ballet de Don Quichotte, first performed at the Louvre on 3 February 1614, of which the original score is held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the work was staged only one month after the publication of César Oudin’s French translation of the novel, and before Cervantes published Part Two of Quixote in 1615.
Why Don Quixote should have been such a frequent theme in lyric drama is less obvious. Regarded by many specialists to be unstageable from a technical point of view, adaptations of Quixote have nevertheless given composers the opportunity to experiment with numerous approaches, ranging from fidelity to the original novel to free invention, even though the task of setting to music the complex story of Cervantes’s hero is not easy. The earliest known operas inspired by Don Quixote were fittingly composed in Italy, the birthplace of drama per musica. These include Sancio, staged in Modena in 1655, with a libretto by Camilo Rima and music by an anonymous composer, and Il Don Chisciotte della Mancha by Carlo Fedeli, performed in Venice in 1680. By far the best known and most widely performed of the early operas on the Don Quixote theme, however, is the three-act opera entitled The comical history of Don Quixote, composed by Henry Purcell, Henry and John Eccles, Colonel Simon Pack, Ralph Courteville and Samuel Akeroyde, among others. The first two acts were performed at the Queens Theatre in Dorset Garden in 1694, the third act following in 1695. Thomas D’Urfey, the author of the complete libretto, introduced significant changes in the plot to emphasize the story’s comic character, as reflected in the title of the opera, and thereby pioneered a predominantly buffo approach to the subject matter.
While ballet and musical drama were the favourite genres among composers
interested in Don Quixote, instrumental music, save for a few memorable
exceptions, found the theme less inspiring.
One of
those exceptions is Telemann’s suite Don Quixote (Ouverture burlesque sur
Don Quichotte).
The first piece of programmatic chamber music inspired by Cervantes’s novel,
the work consists of a suite with an overture, the movements faithfully
reflecting in their titles the episodes on which they are based. This is
undoubtedly one of the finest 18th century compositions devoted to Don
Quixote, although in 1761, six years before his death, Telemann was to
return to the theme in his serenade Dom Quichotte auf der Hochzeit des
Camacho.
From comedy to tragedy
The comic, humorous and burlesque aspect of Cervantes’s novel enjoyed great
popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries, a period in which the work was
almost exclusively read as satire. This tendency is most clearly observed in
the operatic dramatizations of the novel, where Quixote is interpreted as
the adventures of a mad knight rather than a work of profound philosophical
thought. It was with the 19th century and the advent of Romanticism that
Quixote began to be seen not as an adventure story, but as the story of a
knight errant with a mission to change the world. Henceforward, Don Quixote
would become a standard-bearer for the great moral values - nobility of
spirit, courage, honour, virtue and pure, ideal love - that he believes
should rule the world. Disinterested sentiment was the order of the day.
From this time on, Don Quixote began to be known as the “Knight of the Sad
Countenance”, an epithet already hinted at as early as 1813 by the Swiss
literary critic Sismondi, when he described Cervantes’s novel as “the
saddest book ever written.”
Works such as Don Quixote, by the Austrian composer Wilhelm Kienzl, which was first performed at the Berlin Court Opera on 18 November 1898, were, with their Wagnerian sonorities, among the first to focus on the tragic quality of the original text. Kienzl, who also wrote the libretto, was later to record in his memoirs the reception of his tragicomedy by the public:
“I should have remembered that the public does not generally care to be presented with difficult situations: what it wants is to be swept away by the action; it cannot - or will not - be made to laugh and cry by the same piece of music.”
The idealism of his Don Quixote is such that it does not baulk at self-destruction; at the end of the work, we see Don Quixote burning his beloved books of chivalry and flinging himself into the flames. The opera was a flop, causing the composer, who identified closely with the ideals of his hero, to abandon writing opera for the next thirteen years. In spite of the work’s artistic quality, it has failed to enter the repertoire of the world’s opera houses.
Only weeks before Kienzl’s Don Quixote, Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Quixote: Fantastic Variations on a Chivalrous Theme, op. 35, was first performed in Cologne by the Gürzenich Orchestra under the direction of Franz Wüllner, with Friedrich Grützmacher as soloist. The work was performed again on 18 March the following year, this time conducted by the composer himself in Frankfurt, to a much more enthusiastic audience than at the work’s première in Cologne. The piece consists of an introduction and ten variations, each of which is preceded by an indication of the chapter of the original novel on which it is based. The theme-and-variation form allowed its composer to write for virtuoso orchestra as well as explore in depth the characters of the novel: Don Quixote is represented by the solo cello and Sancho Panza, his squire, by the viola. This instrumental characterization does not, however, preclude other instrumental combinations. Regarded as a masterpiece of the symphonic poem repertoire because of its great originality and formal perfection, the work showcases Strauss’s exceptional gift for orchestration, as well as mirroring the multiple layers inherent in Cervantes’s novel, from irony to tenderness, from high seriousness to the burlesque, from joy to trenchant and sometimes excruciating sadness.
The 19th century was also the heyday of the ballet: the version of Don
Quixote choreographed by Marius Petipa to music by Léon Minkus was staged in
Moscow in 1869; soon after that, in 1871, a second production was staged in
St Petersburg. The ballet combined several academic dance sequences of great
virtuosity with others evoking a colourful, stereotyped image of an exotic
Spain, the Spain of gypsies and bullfighters, expressed through the medium
of Andalusian melodies grafted onto Cervantes’s text. Thanks to its winning
hybrid formula, the ballet was a success and served as the inspiration for
many subsequent versions. In 1900, Gorsky staged in Moscow his own version
based on Petipa’s second scenario. This was followed by numerous productions
in Russia under Lopukhox, Zakharov, Messerer and others. Gorsky-Petipa’s Don
Quixote was to become the ballet version par excellence, and in the 20th
century would become the starting point for a number of Russian émigré
choreographers and dancers who staged notable productions of the ballet in
Europe, including those of Anna Pavlova (London, 1924, choreographed by
Nivikoff), Rudolf Nureyev (Vienna, 1966) and Mikhail Baryshnikov
(Washington, 1978).
The 20th century
By far the most receptive period as regards Don Quixote, however, was to be
the twentieth century, when over half of the musical works of all kinds
inspired by the novel were written. The first to usher in the century was
Jules Massenet’s five-act heroic comedy Don Quichotte, with a libretto by
Henri Cain that was in turn based on Jacques le Lorrain’s dramatic work Le
Chevalier de la longue figure (1904). The opera had its debut at
Montecarlo’s Théâtre du Casino on 24 February 1910 under the direction of
Leon Jenny, with the Russian tenor Feodor Chaliapine in the role of Don
Quixote, Lucy Arbell as Dulcinea and Gresse as Sancho Panza. The work falls
squarely into the category of free interpretation of Cervantes’s characters.
While Massenet’s Sancho retains the character of the original, his Dulcinea
becomes real flesh and blood, no longer the peasant girl who exists as a
fine lady only in Don Quixote’s dreams. The composer attempts - sometimes a
little artificially - to recreate the sound of 16th-century Spain, although
for many critics, including Gabriel Fauré, he falls into the trap of an all
too obvious exoticism which adds little to the artistic interest of the
work. This is what Massenet himself had to say about the success of Don
Quichotte (1912):
“The audience’s rapturous applause must have come as an exquisitely sweet reward [for the performers] on 28th December, 1910, during the dress rehearsal which lasted from one until five in the afternoon. I also celebrated New Year’s Day in style: although I was very ill in bed that day, I received calling cards from my faithful pupils and telegrams from friends, all delighted and congratulating me on my success... In its first year, Don Quichotte ran for eighty consecutive performances at the Gaîté-Lyrique, under the management of the Isola Brothers.”
Yet if we had to single out just one Quixote-inspired work because of its lasting significance as one of the most widely performed and admired pieces, as well as being by one of the most internationally acclaimed Spanish composers, it would have to be Manuel de Falla’s El retablo del maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show), a chamber opera commissioned by Princess Polignac and written between 1919 and 1923. Basing the libretto on Chapters XXV and XXVI of Part Two of Quixote, Falla also drew material from other chapters, although always respecting the character of the original novel. A concert version of the work was first performed on 23 March 1923 at Teatro de San Fernando in Seville, while the stage version had its first performance on 25 June that same year at Princess Polignac’s theatre in Paris.
In his music, Falla makes use of a wide variety of sources and techniques,
ranging from popular pregones (sung public proclamations) to sonorities
close to those of the age in which Cervantes created his masterpiece, such
as the guitarist Gaspar Sanz’s Gallarda and the Catalan carol El desembre
congelat, not to mention quotations from his own previous works, as in Scene
6, where the melody of the song sung by the “Trujumán” (the
boy-storyteller), is taken from “Song of the Will o’ the Wisp” in Love the
Magician. The composer’s use of older material is not simply a historicist
evocation of the past, but rather affirms the presence of a living tradition
combined with avant-garde elements. After attending a performance of the
work in Zurich in 1927, Salvador de Madariaga wrote the following in a
letter to his friend:
My dear Falla,
Please believe me when I say that neither my article nor my book dedication
succeeds in repaying the debt I feel I owe you after hearing your Retablo
[literally, "altarpiece"] - the only one likely to be left in Spain if the
Americans continue to buy up those in our churches. Zurich was
unforgettable. As you will see when you read my book, I am an unconditional
admirer of Don Quixote, and as such I was overwhelmed to hear him sing.
Because you, my dear Falla, are the only one to have discovered his voice.
All we critics do is talk - for good or ill - about him, whereas you, and
you alone, have not only enabled him to speak - you have allowed his soul to
sing.
Don Quixote has given rise to the most wide-ranging diversity of musical creations in terms of form and style, some of them, such as those we might describe as programmatic or descriptive music, scrupulously faithful to the original novel, while other works, not confining their descriptive approach strictly to the narrative of the novel, explore the realm of metaphorical allusion. This is the case of Oscar Esplá’s symphonic episode Don Quijote velando las armas, first performed in Alicante in 1924 under the direction of Ernesto Halffter, of which the composer wrote:
“My sole aim is to provide a musical commentary on the hopes, dreams and fantasies entertained by Don Quixote during the night he keeps vigil of arms at the Manchegan inn. My episode concludes with Don Quixote’s departure from the inn, brimming over with satisfaction after being “invested” as a knight by the innkeeper. It is then that our knight’s story truly begins; it is at that moment that the vast, uncharted territory of his future opens up before him.”
Sometimes, the novel acts as a springboard for musical versions which have
little or nothing to do with Cervantes’s original work, constituting very
free interpretations in which composers have felt drawn to the universal
values expressed in the novel, although they make no explicit reference to
it. One such example is José García Román’s La resurrección de Don Quijote
for string orchestra (1994).
Alonso Quijano and the cinema screen
One of the 20th century’s contributions to the musical life of Don Quixote
has been the wealth of versions by European and American composers, a
phenomenon which has much to do with the fact that Cervantes’s novel has now
been translated into more than fifty languages, thereby increasing its
circulation and appeal. The century also saw the emergence of works composed
as the soundtracks for feature films, shorts, documentaries and television
series. The following are just a handful of the many examples that spring to
mind: the French composer Jacques Ibert’s classic film score Don Quichotte
of 1932, with Chaliapine in the title role; Ernesto Halffter’s Don Quijote
de la Mancha (1947) for the film of the same name which was directed by
Rafael Gil; the Russian Kara Abdulfas’s score for Grigory Kozintsev’s Don
Quixote in 1957; Antón García Abril’s music for Televisión Española’s
9-episode series Cervantes, directed by Alfonso Ungría (1980); in 1989, Lalo
Schifrin’s soundtrack for the 6-part series El Quijote, based on a script
adapted by Camilo José Cela and directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, which
was broadcast by Televisión Española in 1991; José Nieto’s soundtrack for El
caballero Don Quijote, again under the direction of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón;
the cartoon series Don Quijote, directed by Cruz Delgado for Televisión
Española between 1979 and 1981, with music by Antonio Areta; and in April
2005, Jorge Fernández Guerra’s version of Pabst’s Don Quixote, performed at
Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid. All testify to the determination of screen
directors to work with top-level composers worthy of Cervantes’s
masterpiece.
But if there is one thing that characterizes the 20th century Quixote repertoire, it is the large number of instrumental pieces devoted to this theme. Of the almost 400 works written in the 20th century, practically half of them are by Spanish composers. Interestingly, many of these compositions explore not only the figure of Don Quixote, as one would expect, but also his beloved Dulcinea, the reason for this particular focus being her role as a symbol of the hero’s unattainable love. As a source of inspiration, she becomes the theme for an infinitely subtle range of musical invention. Thus, in the various librettos, we find widely differing aspects of Dulcinea represented in a variety of guises, from country wench to modern city dweller, from the Virgin Mary to Mary Magdalen, generating a wealth of ideas that composers have explored within their various formal structures to great emotional effect: lamentation, melancholy, sadness, longing, absence and sorrow in an endless range of feelings designed to reflect the loneliness of the enamoured knight. Thus, in Joaquín Rodrigo’s Las ausencias de Dulcinea (1948), a symphonic poem for solo bass, four sopranos and orchestra which won him first prize in the competition marking the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s birth, Don Quixote sings of his loneliness in a melody tinged with the melancholy lyricism of unrequited love. Rodrigo outlined his aims in the work as follows:
“I realised that by using four voices surrounding that of Don Quixote, it was possible to create contrasts between the chivalrous, the ideal and the burlesque. Don Quixote is serious throughout, but the humour is introduced by the orchestra, thereby conveying the full poetic spirit of the piece [...]. The extraordinary idea of using no fewer than four sopranos in the work stems from the fact that wherever he searches for her - North, South, East or West on Quixote will never find the elusive, phantasm-like Dulcinea.”
What Sismondi described as the saddest book is also, from the first page to the last, a hymn to love. Dulcinea represents the ideal that gives the knight errant’s life meaning. “For the solace of the human heart”, Don Quixote has inspired and will continue to inspire composers. The works of Purcell, Telemann, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Massenet, Ravel, Falla, Rodrigo, Halffter, Ohana, Turina and many, many more are an eloquent musical testament to the universal appeal and stature of this great novel. Varied though they are in approach and interpretation, underlying each one of them is a profound respect for Cervantes’ creation, each composer striving beyond the limits of convention to achieve a sonority that is capable of reflecting the struggle between everyday reality and an ideal world. Commemorations, centenaries and celebrations come and go, but - fortunately for music and for us all - on his journey from love to the loss of love, from discovery to vain searching, the life and adventures of Don Quixote are and will continue to be a living inspiration to composers.
Translated by Jacqueline Minett
Bibliography
BALANCHINE, G.: 101 argumentos de grandes ballets. Madrid: Alianza
Editorial, 1988
BARDON, M.: Don Quichotte en France au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle
(1605-1815). Paris: Librairie ancienne Honoré Champion, 2 vols., 1931.
Facsimile edition, Geneva: Slatkine, 1974.
Cuatrocientos años de Don Quijote por el mundo. Advisors J. M. Lucía, J.
Montero, B. Lolo, J. A. Molina Foix, A. Perla,. Madrid: Ministerio de
Cultura, 2005.
ESPINÓS, V.: El “Quijote” en la música.
Barcelona: Patronato del IV Centenario del nacimiento de Cervantes, 1947.
ESQUIVAL-HEINEMANN, B.: Don Quijote’s Sally into the World of Opera:
Libretti between 1680 and 1987. Col. Studies on Cervantes and his time. New
York: Peter Lang, 1993.
FLYNN, S.: “The presence of Don Quixote in music”. UMI Dissertation, 1987.
1 The present article incorporates the results of the research projects
entitled Temas cervantinos en la música y la danze europea siglos XVI-XX and
El Quijote en la música europea siglos XVII-XIX. Mito y desmitificación,
funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science from 2000 to the
present, which have been carried out under my direction by the research team
at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
2 The book to which Salvador de Madariaga refers in his letter is his Guía
del lector del “Quijote”.
Madrid:
Espasa calpe, 1926.