The magical virtue of poetry is to be always infused with duende, so to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, since with duende it is easier to love and to understand, we are sure to be loved, to be understood, and it is just this struggle for expression and communication that sometimes takes on a fatal character.
This is expression that folds together life and death, and it is the art of flamenco at its best. Lorca would say: poetry at its best, and any other art.
To this world we went, with sometimes weeks in between our excursions, so that we could recover our senses. Like raw, traditional blues in the United States, it’s an acquired taste. And like the blues, it runs deep into life and seems to color even our dreams. Our first, baffled encounter had instructed us rightly: the singing is primary, then the guitar. Andalusia has a deep bench of flamenco guitarists. They should be considered one of the principal assets in the national treasury of Spain and one of the most precious holdings of Europe. And there are dancers, after all, though more rarely, who can send a bolt of electricity through the audience. And most performances have musicians who accompany the singing with their hands, in the sonorous rhythm called palmas. Also, the caja, a box on the floor, that is the percussion instrument of flamenco. All in all, it’s such a rare and distant country that it is useful to have a map.
It turns out to be a map of human experience, in raw and forthright song. Each song is a poem. Love and death are the double suns around which many of the songs revolve. Yet flamenco turns out, as well, to hold in its art the whole prodigious complexity of Spanish history. So far from being an exclusively gypsy art, the gypsies fell heir to the whole musical heritage of Al-Andalus, to which they brought their genius for assimilation, as well as their resolute independence and strong ties to the Andalusian earth. And so flamenco comes in a bewildering and exultant variety of forms, since a poem that is sung might be derived from Arabic or Jewish sources, from gypsy ceremonies, or from the folklore of any of the host of cultures that found a home in Iberia: from Christian rites, Indian music, or even Celtic traditions. There is even flamenco that takes in musical contributions from Latin America—like the milongas from Argentina, or the guajiras from Cuba—and so enriches the songs with the savor of the New World.
There is flamenco that comes directly from work, work songs that hold the rhythm and ardor of labor, its effort and loneliness. The trilleras, for instance, originated among grinders of wheat; the tarantas are work songs of the miners; the martinetes, music and poetry from the dark shop of the blacksmith, that use the sound of hammers striking an anvil; the caleseras, songs of the labor and solitude of the drivers of carts in the country, with the rhythm of horse’s hooves and the mystery of long mountain roads. There is even a genre of songs from jail cells, the carceleras, sung in lament, or to carry a message to loved ones in freedom. To this day, there is a flamenco workshop in the Albolote prison in Granada.
There are song traditions tied directly to cities, as if they had grown from the alleyways, the plazas and caves, then were refined over decades and centuries until finally they came to embody a place in song. The malagueñas hail from Málaga, as a descendant of the great fandangos, and the granainas and media granainas are forms redolent of Granada itself, with pronounced Moorish rhythm and storytelling. The rondiñas celebrate the mystical city of Ronda, a city with a history of Sufi scholars and a surround of strange and beautiful mountains. The murcianas hail from Murcia, birthplace of the great poet, mystic, and theologian Ibn El-Arabi. The lively sevillanas, with their inspiriting and contagious rhythm, are part of the history and savor of the great Andalusian city of Seville, where Ibn El-Arabi studied. We do not know if the great twelfth-century poet set down any verses that even today flare here and there as flamenco in Andalusia. But this is Spain, and you never know.
There is a whole genre of flamenco, the nanas, that consists of lullabies, which is just as it should be, for what parent can deny the surge of hope and thankfulness that visits us when we hold a baby. It’s a moment honored by song in just about every culture.
A cinnamon angel
Watches over your crib
His head toward the sun
His feet toward the moon.
Off to sleep goes
My rose among roses
Sleep, little girl,
As late night closes
My baby carnation,
Opening rosebud
Sleep, my life,
I’ll sing you a lullaby …
Sleep, little star of the morning
I quote these lovely verses to show how full a spectrum of experience flamenco may explore. As in traditional American blues, we have songs of the most tender communion, songs of longing and cherishing, and then the next moment, songs of black rancor, acid bitterness, or loss so anguished we feel mauled slowly to death. Many of us come in the course of our lives to such extremes because we love, and because so often the cultures and countries we make fail the ideals we bring to them. Flamenco gives verse and voice to the core of such common experience because there is nothing it will not take on: it is a music of celebration because it faces down the darkness.
Take, for instance, these three verses from different soleares, songs of solitude:
The world I live in
Is lost to hope
No need to bury me
I am buried alive.
I saw her black eyes
Now all the world
Is black to me.
Your street is not just your street
It is any street.
Any road. Anywhere.
And this quatrain about hard luck:
Misfortune falls upon me
What can be done?
Saints whom I painted
Demons become.
Lorca sees the centermost of flamenco in the great siguiriyas, primordial songs of cut-loose emotional power. The singer holds death close. The distinguished flamenco guitarist and writer D.E. Pohren tells us this form is not so much sung: it is unleashed upon the audience. And just as Lorca gave us his far-rambling essay, full of metaphors like fireworks on the nature of duende, so we have from him an emblematic speech on the cante jondo—deep song—which he takes to be the source and central form of flamenco singing. It is February of 1922; it is Lorca’s debut as a lecturer, and he will focus on musical history and on the siguiriyas. He has, with the revered Spanish composer Manual Falla, organized a festival in Granada—the Concurso de Cante Jondo (Contest of Deep Song), and the months preceding the festival are marked by Lorca’s talk, given at the usual Spanish ten in the evening, to the accompaniment of guitar. We should let the poet speak for himself. A set of quotes will bring us fully into his presence.
… cante jondo is like the trill of birds, the song of a chanticleer, the natural music of the woods and fountain … It is a most rare example of primitive song, the oldest in Europe, bearing in its sound the shuddering, raw emotion of the first Eastern races.
And who are these original poets and musicians? Lorca goes on to recognize them explicitly: he says that some of the oldest songs, the virtual stem of the great siguiriyas, “preserve their Arabic and Moorish affiliation.” And later research has proved him right. D.E. Pohren, when he constructed his genealogy—a whole family tree of flamenco singing, guitar, and dancing—noted how a whole set of branches showed strong Arabic influence, among them many of the work songs and songs associated with cities that were some of the strongholds of Al-Andalus. And in his Encyclopedia of Flamenco, he notes other Moorish influences, in forms such as the zambra, which clearly has roots in Muslim music and dance. There are other remarkable sources, which Lorca did not—perhaps dared not—mention. Some flamenco genres, especially the saetas, have Jewish origins. In one of those transcendent ironies found throughout Andalusia, they are songs devoted to Jesus and Mary, and their modern versions are sung principally in the precessions of Semana Santa, the famous celebrations of the Holy Week immediately preceding Easter. Such a musical form, of co
urse, has made no sense for half a millennium but is perfectly sensible when we think of the centuries of the convivencia.
But let us carry on with Lorca’s speech. Here are some passages:
The gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible cry … It is the cry of dead generations, a penetrating elegy for lost centuries, a plaintive evocation of love in a place of uncanny moons and wind.
It is not a matter of coincident sources, it did not reveal itself in one decisive moment, but is formed by an accumulation of historical and secular events here on our peninsula.
And what are these sources? Whence comes the cante jondo? Following the research of Falla, Lorca tells us of three main formative influences:
… the adoption by the Spanish church of liturgical chanting, the invasion of the Saracens, and the arrival in Spain of numerous bands of gypsies … resulting in a song purely Andalusian.
Lorca goes on to quote Falla on the strange technical properties of cante jondo, which Falla derives, in part, from the Byzantine liturgy:
… some Andalusian songs from a period well before the adoption of the Byzantine liturgy by the Spanish church are closely allied to music known today in Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis, music that is called, movingly to any Granadan with a heart, “the music of the Moors of Granada.”
It is already an extraordinary lecture, and Lorca is just getting warmed up. He wants not only to speak in praise of cante jondo. He wants all of Granada to join him:
… we must cry out in defense of these pure and truthful songs.
Lorca wants to lead his audience to an art that lives outside official channels, an art with unquenchable life, indispensable to life. In the months surrounding his lecture, he had, on foot, wandered throughout the province of Granada in the company of his childhood friend—Manolo Angeles Ortiz. Together they visited villages and farms, bars and campfires, listening, waiting, searching for the masters of cante jondo, listening to songs in small plazas in the twilight. Manolo Angeles was full of grief, having just lost his wife, who had died a year after giving birth to a daughter, Lorca’s goddaughter. On country roads, he and Lorca sang to one another:
It is deep, truly deep, deeper than any well, deeper than the seas of the world, deeper even than the hearts of those that create it presently and the voices of those who sing it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from a faraway people, crossing beyond the cemetery of the years … it comes from the first tear and the first kiss.
It is the song of night … it has nothing but night, deep night shot through with stars.
All of these exclamations proceeded from Lorca’s long study of Spanish popular music, the music that could not be extinguished by political power, that survived in the daily life of Andalusians. The poet was a gifted musician and knew hundreds of folksongs by heart. He could sit down at the piano and play and sing for hours. In cante jondo, he found more than music. He found a poetry with the savor of earth, a unity with earth both physical and spiritual.
All the poems of cante jondo show a magnificent pantheism, in dialog with the very earth, air, moon, and seas, with humble violets or rosemary or a bird. The things of the world come into their own and take form energetically in the lyrics.
Lorca, in the months preceding his lecture, had written a first draft of his first major work of verse, called, as we might expect, Poem of the Deep Song. In it he sought to be just such a singer, to compose songs in verse of rare vehemence and strange authority, so as to connect us to Andalusian land and history and to a current of beauty that carries away those who love the region and its people. After a search for the earliest roots of the lyrics that he had, with Falla, studied so intensively, he thought he knew where to look for the poetic sensibility he found there.
Just as in the siguiriya and its derivatives we find ancient elements from the East, so in many lyrics of the cante jondo we find an affinity with the most ancient songs of the East:
When our songs come to the extreme pitch of suffering and love, they match the expressive verse of magnificent Arabic and Persian poets.
And who does Lorca single out among those poets of the east? None other than Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, two of the great Sufi poets of Persia. It is remarkable to contemplate, this impassioned bond proposed by Lorca between some of the greatest mystical poetry in history and the life-giving beauty of cante jondo. It is as if Lorca was reaching back into just the history Spain had turned away from so violently and urging us to examine it once more, urging us to consider what comes of a hard but beautiful unity of cultures, to consider the improbable power of poetry to survive through centuries, even if it must take refuge in taverns and by campfires.
Lorca and Falla worked in company of other aficionados in Granada, all through late 1921 and the winter and spring of 1922 to prepare the Concurso. One week before it was to begin, Lorca, having given his first lecture, now gave his first poetry reading, accompanied by a young guitarist named Andrés Segovia. Thus in that one night in one small room in Granada, the audience had two of the most extraordinary artists in modern Spanish history.
Lorca read poems from his unpublished Poem of the Deep Song, and the force of his joy in the form left his audience enraptured. A local reviewer in the newspaper Defensor de Granada said: “This dreamy young man who is so in love with the beautiful and the sublime will soon be a glory.” Lorca was 23 years old and electric with promise.
The Concurso on June 13 and 14 of 1922 was held in the Alhambra and attracted an extraordinary four thousand people to an open courtyard alongside the palace. Performers came from all over Andalusia, and the two winners were the 72-year-old Diego Bermúdez, who had walked eighty miles to sing, and Manuel Ortega, an 11-year-old who would go on to become one of the great cante jondo singers of the century. The second night of the contest, there was a downpour. Hardly anyone left. The Concurso, first of its kind in Andalusia, was an explosive success noted all over Spain, and in Paris and London as well. It was a brilliant moment in Granada.
During that time, we have a sense of Lorca’s coming into his own. He was irrepressible and bold. He would visit gypsy camps to read his poems in homage to the cante jondo, and the Lorca biographer Leslie Stainton tells us of one such visit:
When he read Poem of Deep Song to one group of gypsies, they were so dazzled by his impassioned performance that afterward they swarmed around him, kissing and hugging him as though he were one of their own.
Lorca took just such risks, trying out his work on strangers and friends. He was a phenomenon, a young man of exotic energy, working up a world of his own. Everywhere he would go in the ensuing years, he found his way to a company of friends with deep gifts of their own. The list is long, dazzling, and we can only touch on a few names: Manuel de Falla, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, the professor and politician Ferdinand de los Rios, the great actress Margarita Xirgu, the philologist Ramon Menéndez Pidal. It is as if Lorca lived in a force field of great minds. Three of them, Neruda, Aleixandre, and Jimenez, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
When we read the descriptions of Lorca, what moves us is the incandescent life of the man: poet, musician, essayist, playwright, actor, director, producer; incorrigible creator of whimsical, tragic drawings, puppeteer, folksinger, storyteller; and a sensitive, devoted friend. He gave electrifying readings of his verse and experimented with language and form with a restless ebullience. With the production of his play Mariana Pineda in 1927 and the publication of the book of poems Gypsy Ballads in 1928, he became a celebrated figure in Spain. More plays followed, and more travel: New York and then Havana, where the sensuous lifestyle and beautiful companionship gave him what he called later “the happiest days of his life.”
We read of this and remember another element of Lorca’s character: his almost complete lack of pretension. For all his life, he was never Don Señor anything, to anyone. He was just Federico.
In 1931, with the coming to p
ower of the Spanish Republic, Lorca had a chance come momentously his way: to go throughout the Spanish countryside, bringing the life of Spanish classical theater to small villages. The original idea had come from Madrid University, and it was part of the effort of the Republic to reform education nationwide. The idea was to take the plays of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca to plazas and theaters and to perform free of charge, using the best young talent, carrying a portable stage that could be swiftly assembled with basic sets and lighting, and taking everyone with them: not just the players, but the carpenters and electricians, drivers and stage managers. This university theater was known as La Barraca (a country barn or storehouse), since its members hoped to have such a simple structure in Madrid for plays year-round. They never got their permanent venue, but they did elect Lorca their artistic director. He auditioned students, gathered talent, advised on the set and props, arranged music, and brought in help from among the whole community of the arts. And in midsummer 1932, Lorca and the students set out in a caravan: a bus, a couple of vans, a few cars. Reading about it, it is hard to imagine a more utopian initiative: as a public service, to see that brilliant Spanish plays, with vitality and joy, brought something of the whole spectrum of Spanish theatrical imagination to people who had almost no chance of such an experience. Despite the attacks of the ultra-right-wing press of the day and some outright attempts to sabotage the troupe, La Barraca was a rambunctious success, with rapt audiences and celebration among the critics. The most moving story is from the first tour, in the plaza of the tiny village of Almazán, where during the presentation of Calderon’s Life Is a Dream, it began to rain. The players carried on. The audience, mostly peasants, stayed on with them, deeply moved by the play, following every turn of events onstage, clapping and laughing at one or another episode. It is a moment with an uncanny similarity to the second night of the Contest of Deep Song at the Alhambra. Twice in his short life, García Lorca had brought to the people of Spain an art so beautiful that people would sit in the rain to watch, to listen, to understand.
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