Lorca, and the Title Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
By Jonathan Raabe
Federico García Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, about ten miles west of Granada. He was arrested on August 19, 1936, shot by Nationalist militia near Alfacar at the beginning of the Civil War, and buried where nobody has been able to find him. Major excavations in 2009, 2014, and 2016 all failed. Searches near Víznar continue.
He was thirty-eight. He supplies every word of one half of our October program, and reaches into the other half as well.
The title is borrowed from a different book
This is worth getting right, because a good many program notes do not.
Lorca published a celebrated collection in 1928 called Romancero gitano — the gypsy ballads, containing Romance de la luna, luna, La casada infiel, Romance sonámbulo, and the rest. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Op. 152 is called Romancero Gitano.
Not one of its seven texts comes from that book.
All seven come from a different collection: Poema del cante jondo, which Lorca wrote in 1921 and did not publish until 1931. Castelnuovo-Tedesco borrowed the more famous title and set the poems of the earlier book. Hyperion’s own note on the work puts it plainly: the texts “belong not to a ‘Gypsy Romance Book’ but to Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo of 1921.”
Where each of the seven sits inside that collection:
- Baladilla de los tres ríos — the opening poem of the collection
- La guitarra — from Poema de la siguiriya gitana
- Puñal — from Poema de la soleá
- Procesión — from Poema de la saeta
- Memento — from Viñetas flamencas
- Baile — from Tres ciudades
- Crótalo — from Seis caprichos
What cante jondo is
Cante jondo means deep song: the oldest and most austere strand of Andalusian flamenco singing, older and plainer than the flamenco most people picture, and in the early 1920s widely believed to be dying out.
On June 13 and 14, 1922, during Corpus Christi, Granada held a Concurso de Cante Jondo — a competition intended to find and honor singers still carrying the tradition. Manuel de Falla conceived it and organized it. Lorca, then twenty-three, was his leading collaborator: he lectured on the form, wrote about it, and did more than anyone else to give it a public.
He had written the Poema del cante jondo the year before. The poems are short, spare, and image-driven, and several of them name the forms directly — a siguiriya, a soleá, a saeta. They are not descriptions of the music. They are attempts to do in words what the singing does.
The poem about the instrument on stage
The second movement is La guitarra. It is a poem about a guitar beginning to weep, and about the impossibility of stopping it once it starts.
Ars Nova sings it with a guitarist sitting in front of the audience. The instrument the poem is about is present, audible, and being played while the words about it are sung. Very little else in the choral repertoire does that.
We have kept quotation here to a minimum by choice. Lorca’s Spanish originals remain under United States copyright until January 1, 2027, and the standard English translations are under copyright of their own. The poems are widely available in print, and a good bilingual edition is the best way to meet them.
Why he is on both halves
Corrado Margutti opens Rivers, after the Prologue, with a movement called Balada de la placeta — a paraphrase of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Baladilla de los tres ríos. So Lorca is the one voice reaching across both works on the program: the poet of 1921, set in 1951 by a composer in exile, and reached back toward in 2020 by a composer writing about people crossing borders.
The performances
Friday, October 9, 7:30 pm, Mountain View United Methodist Church, 355 Ponca Place, Boulder. Saturday, October 10, 7:30 pm, St. Paul Center for Music and the Arts, 1600 Grant Street, Denver, and by livestream. Sunday, October 11, 4:00 pm, United Church of Christ, 1500 9th Avenue, Longmont.
Tickets and details: Rivers & Streams. See also the composer who left Italy and the two works that quote each other.
