Federico García
Lorca Deep Song
(Importancia histórica y artística del primitivo canto Andaluz llamado
‘Cante Jondo’ 1922)
A. S. Kline © 2008 All Rights Reserved
This work may be
freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for
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(A lecture given in Granada, 19th February 1922)
You are gathered together tonight, in the salon of the Centro Artístico,
to hear my humble, yet sincere words, and I wish them to be luminous and
profound, so as to convince you of the marvellous artistic truth contained in
primitive Andalusian song, that which is
called deep song, cante jondo.
The group of enthusiastic friends and intellectuals who support the idea
of this festival are sounding no less than an alarm. Gentlemen, the musical soul of the race is in
grave danger! The artistic riches of a
whole people are on their way to oblivion!
It seems that each day which passes another leaf falls from the wondrous
tree of Andalusian lyric, old men carry to the grave the priceless treasures of
past generations, and an avalanche, gross and stupid, of cheap music obscures
the delightful popular culture of all Spain.
It is a noble work of patriotism that we are trying to realize; a work of
salvation, a work of friendship and of love.
You have all heard of cante jondo, and indeed have a more or less precise
idea of it … yet it is almost certain that for those of you who are not
initiated into its historical and artistic transcendence it evokes a certain
immorality, the atmosphere of taverns, rowdiness, the ethos of the café dance
floor, a ridiculous sobbing, something typically Spanish, in fact – yet we must
suppress this feeling for the sake of Andalusia, our millennial spirit and our
individual hearts.
It cannot be that the most moving and profound songs of our mysterious
soul should be maligned as mean and debauched; it cannot be that they wish to
fasten that thread which links us to the impenetrable Orient to the neck of the
drunkard’s guitar; it cannot be that they seek to stain the most diamantine of
our songs with the clouded wine of the professional scoundrel.
The time has come then for the voices of Spanish musicians, poets and
artists to merge, driven by an instinct for preservation, to mark and exalt the
limpid beauties and suggestiveness of such singing.
To confuse the patriotic and idealistic idea of this festival with the
lamentable vision of the cantaor with his tapping stick and caricatured wailing
about cemeteries indicates a total lack of comprehension, and a total
misunderstanding of what is intended. On
reading the notice of this festival every man of sense, uninformed on the
matter, must ask: ‘What then is this cante jondo?’
Before proceeding we should draw an essential distinction between cante
jondo and flamenco singing, an essential distinction based on antiquity,
structure and spirit.
The name cante jondo is given to a category of Andalucian song, of which
the perfect and genuine prototype is the Gipsy siguiriya, from which derive
other songs preserved by the people, such as polos, martinetes, carceleras, and
soleares.
Those called malagueñas,
granadinas, rondeñas, peteneras etc., should be considered as merely offshoots
of those mentioned, since they differ from them in their architecture as much
as their rhythm. They are those grouped
as flamenco song.
The great master Manuel de Falla, true glory of Spain, and soul of this
festival, believes that the caña and the playera, which have all but vanished,
show in their primitive style the same mode of composition as the siguiriya and
its brethren, and that not so long ago they were simple variants of such songs.
Relatively recent texts suggest to him
that during the first third of the nineteenth century, they occupied the place
we now grant to the siguiriya. Estébanez Calderón, in his lovely Escenas
andaluzas, notes that the cana is the primitive stem of these songs, which
preserve their Arab and Moorish affiliation, and observes, with his
characteristic perspicacity, that the word caña is little different from
gannia, which is Arabic for ‘song’.
The essential difference between cante jondo and flamenco is that the
origin of the former must be sought in the primitive musical systems of India,
that is, in the first manifestations of song, while the latter, a consequence
of the first, cannot be said to acquire its definitive form until the
eighteenth century.
The former is song imbued with the mysterious colour of primordial ages;
the latter is relatively modern, its emotional interest eclipsed by that of the
other. Spiritual colour versus local
colour: that is the profound difference.
That is to say that, cante jondo, like the primitive musical systems of
India, is merely a stammer, an emission, higher or lower in pitch, of the
voice, a marvelous buccal undulation, that breaks out of the echoing prison of
our tempered scale, will not suffer the cold rigid pentagram of our modern
music, and makes the hermetic flowers of semitones open in a thousand petals.
Flamenco singing proceeds not by undulations but by leaps; its rhythm is
as measured as that of our music, and was born centuries after Guido of Arezzo
gave names to the notes.
Cante jondo is like the trilling of birds, the cry of the cockerel, and
the natural music of woods and streams.
It is, then, the rarest specimen of primitive song, the oldest in Europe,
bearing in its notes the naked, shiver of emotion of the first oriental races.
Manuel de Falla, who has studied the matter deeply, and on whose work I
base my own, affirms that the Gypsy siguiriya is the prototype of deep song and
roundly declares that it is the only genre on our continent that preserves in
all its purity, as much structurally as stylistically, the primary qualities of
the primitive songs of the oriental peoples.
Before I knew the master’s opinion, the Gypsy siguiriya had always evoked
for me (an incurable lyricist) the endless road, one without crossroads, which
ends at the pulsating fountain of the girl-child, poetry, the road where the
first bird died and the first arrow rusted.
The Gypsy siguiriya begins with a dreadful cry, a cry that divides the
landscape into two perfect hemispheres. It
is the cry of dead generations, a poignant elegy for vanished centuries, the
evocation of love filled with pathos beneath other winds and other moons.
Then the melodic phrase begins to unfold the mystery of tone, and
withdraw the precious stone of a sob, a sonorous tear borne on the river of the
voice. No Andalusian, hearing that cry,
can resist a quiver of emotion, no regional song can compare in poetic
grandeur, and it is seldom, very seldom, that the human spirit has created
works of such nature.
But do not believe that the siguiriya and its variants are simply songs
transplanted from east to west. No. ‘It is more a matter of grafting (says Manuel
de Falla), or rather, of coincident sources, which were not revealed at one
specific moment, but represent the accumulated effect of the historical and
secular events that unfolded in our peninsula’, and thus it is that the songs
peculiar to Andalusia, though essentially akin to those of peoples
geographically remote from us, possess their own intimate and unmistakable
national character.
The historical events which Manuel de Falla refers to, of a magnitude to
disproportionately influence our songs, are threefold: the Spanish Church’s
adoption of liturgical chant, the Saracen invasion, and the arrival in Spain of
numerous bands of Gypsies. They are the
mysterious migrant folk who gave cante jondo its definitive form.
That is shown by the qualifying term ‘Gipsy’ which the siguiriya retains,
and by the extraordinary number of Gypsy words in the texts of the songs.
That is not to say, of course, that this singing is purely Gypsy, since
Gypsies exist throughout Europe and elsewhere in our peninsula, while these
songs are only nurtured in Andalusia.
It is a purely Andalusian singing, the seeds of which existed in this
region before the Gypsies arrived.
The essential similarities which Manuel de Falla notes between cante
jondo and certain extant songs of India are: ‘Enharmonics, as in intermediate
modulation; a restricted melodic line, rarely exceeding the compass of a sixth,
and the reiterative well-nigh obsessive use of a single note, a process proper
to certain forms of incantation, including recitations which might be termed
prehistoric, and have led many to suppose that chanting is the earliest form of
language.’
In this manner cante jondo, especially the siguiriya creates the
impression of sung prose, destroying all sense of rhythmic metre, though in
reality its literary texts are assonant tercets and quatrains.
According to Manuel de Falla: ‘Though Gipsy melody is rich in ornamental
turns, they are used – as in those songs of India – only at certain moments, as
outbursts or fits of expressiveness suggested by the emotional power of the
text, and we must consider them more as amplified vocal inflexions than as
ornamental turns, though that is ultimately their form when transposed into the
geometric intervals of the tempered scale.’
One can definitely affirm that in deep song, as in those songs from the
heart of Asia, the musical scale is a direct consequence of what we might call
the oral scale.
Many authors have been led to suppose that word and song were once the
same thing, and Louis Lucas in his Acoustique Nouvelle, published in Paris in
1840, when discussing the excellence of the enharmonic genre, says: ‘It makes
its first appearance naturally, as an imitation of birdsong, of animal calls,
and of the endless range of sounds made by material things.’
Hugo Riemann, in his Catechism of Musical Aesthetics, affirms that the
song of birds approaches true music and cannot be treated separately from human
song since both are the expressions of a single sensibility.
The great master Felipe Pedrell, one of the first Spaniards to treat
questions of folklore scientifically, writes, in his magnificent Cancionero
popular español: ‘Musical orientalism survives in various popular songs and is
deeply rooted in our nation through the influence of ancient Byzantine
civilization on the ritual used in the Spanish Church, from the conversion of
our country to Christianity until the eleventh century when the Roman liturgy
can be said to have been fully introduced.’
Manuel de Falla adds to this statement of his old master, specifying the
elements of Byzantine liturgical chant revealed in the siguiriya, which are:
the tonal modes of primitive systems (not be confused with those known as Greek
modes), the enharmony inherent in those modes, and the lack of metric rhythm in
the melodic line. ‘These same properties characterize certain Andalusian songs
which appeared long after the Spanish Church’s adoption of Byzantine liturgical
music, songs which have a close affinity with the music which in Morocco,
Algiers and Tunis is still called in a manner that stirs the hearts of all true
Granadans, “the music of the Moors of Granada.”’
Returning to our analysis of the siguiriya, Manuel de Falla, with solid
musical knowledge and exquisite intuition, finds in this singing ‘specific
forms and characteristics distinct from its relationship to sacred chant and
the music of the Moors of Granada.’ That is, having investigated their
surprising melodies he has found an extraordinary agglutinative Gypsy element.
He accepts the historical thesis that attributes an Indic origin to the
Gypsies; a thesis that agrees wonderfully with the results of his fascinating
research.
According to this thesis, about the year 1400, the Gipsy race fled from
India, driven out by the hundred thousand horsemen of the mighty Tamerlane.
Twenty years later, their tribes appeared in various European cities,
entering Spain with the Saracen armies that periodically arrived on our coast
from Egypt and Arabia.
This race, arriving in our own Andalusia, united ancient indigenous
elements to what they themselves had brought, and gave definitive form to what
we call cante jondo.
So, it is to them that we owe the creation of these songs, the core of
our spirit: to them we owe the construction of those lyrical channels through
which all the pain and ritual gestures of the race freely flow.
And it is these songs, gentlemen, that for more than fifty years we have
tried to confine to foul-smelling taverns and brothels. That dreadful, doubting
era of the Spanish lyric-drama, the zarzuela, the era of Antonio Grilo, and of
historical painting, is to blame. While the Russians were burning with love of
folklore, a unique source, as Robert Schumann said, of all true and
characteristic art, while in France the gilded wave of Impression quivered, in
Spain, a country almost unique in its tradition of popular beauty, the guitar
and cante jondo were things for the lower classes.
As time has gone on this prejudice has become so great that we must now
cry out in defence of these pure and truthful songs.
The spiritual young people of Spain understand the situation thus.
Cante jondo has been cultivated since time immemorial, and every
illustrious traveller who has ventured to journey over our surprising and
varied landscapes, has been affected by this profound psalmody which has
traversed and defined our complex and unique Andalusia, from the peaks of the
Sierra Nevada to the thirsty olive-groves of Córdoba, from the Sierra de
Cazorla to the joyful mouth of the Guadalquivir.
Between the time when Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos called attention to
the lovely incoherent danza prima of Asturias and the days of the formidable
Menéndez Pelayo, great progress was made in the understanding of folklore. Isolated artists, minor poets studied the
matter from various points of view until Spain began the essential and
patriotic task of collecting the poems and songs. Evidence of this are the Songbooks generously
subsidized by respective provincial governments, that of Burgos by Federico Olmeda,
Salamanca by Dámaso Ledesma, and Asturia by Eduardo Martínez Torner.
Yet we most readily recognize the extraordinary importance of cante jondo
in its well-nigh decisive influence on the formation of the modern Russian
school and by the high esteem in which it was held by Claude Debussy, that
lyrical Argonaut and discoverer of a new musical world.
In 1847 Mikhail Glinka visited Granada. He had been in Berlin studying
composition with Siegfried Dehn and was aware of Weber’s patriotic struggle to
combat the pernicious musical influence of the Italian composers. He was deeply
impressed with the songs of the Russian immensities and dreamed of a natural
music, a national music that would convey the sense of her vast landscape.
This visit to our city by the father and founder of the
Slavic-Orientalist school is of great interest. He befriended a celebrated
guitarist of the day, Francisco Rodríguez Murciano; and listened to him playing
variations on and accompaniments to our songs; and amidst the eternal rhythms
of our city’s waters the marvellous idea of creating a school was born, and the
bold concept of utilizing, for the first time, the whole-tone scale.
On his return home, he publicized his ideas and explained the
peculiarities of our mode of singing, which he studied and employed in his
works.
Music altered its course; the composer had at last found its true source.
His friends and disciples turned to folk songs and sought the structure
for their creations not only in Russia but in southern Spain.
Proofs of this are his Souvenir d’une nuit d’été á Madrid and parts of
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade and Capriccio Espagnol, which you all know.
Conceive of the sorrowful modulations and grave orientalism of our cante
bearing their influence from Granada to Moscow, the mysterious bells of the
Kremlin echoing the melancholy of our Vela.
In the Spanish Pavilion, at the great Paris Exhibition of 1900, a group
of Gypsies sang cante jondo in all its purity. They attracted the attention of
the whole city, but especially of one young musician who was engaged in the
struggle all young artists must undertake, the struggle for the new, for the
unforeseen, the search through the seas of thought for un-tarnished emotion.
Day after day he listened to the Andalusian cantaores, and he whose soul
lay wide open to the four winds of the spirit was impregnated with the ancient
Orient by our melodies. He was Claude Debussy. Afterwards he would rise to the summit of European music as the begetter
of new theories.
From many of his works, indeed, there emerge the subtlest evocations of
Spain and above all of Granada, which he considered the true paradise it is.
Claude Debussy, a composer of scents and iridescences, reaches his
highest creative pitch in the tone-poem Iberia a truly brilliant work through
which Andalusian perfumes and essences float as if in dream.
But he reveals the precise extent of the influence of cante jondo on his
work, in the marvellous prelude entitled La Puerta del Vino and in the vague,
tender Soirée en Grenade, where are found, in my judgment, all the emotional
themes of the Granadan night, the blue remoteness of the Vega, the sierra
saluting the tremulous Mediterranean, the enormous teeth of cloud sunk in the
distance, the admirable rubato of the city and the hallucinatory play of its
subterranean waters.
And the most remarkable thing about this is that Debussy, though he
studied our cante profoundly, never saw Granada.
It is a stupendous example, then, of artistic divination, of brilliant
intuition, which I mention in praise of the great composer as an honour to our
people. It reminds me of that great
mystic Swedenborg’s ability to view the burning of Stockholm from London, and
of the profound prophecies of the saints of antiquity.
In Spain, cante jondo has had an undeniable influence on all our best
composers, in the ‘great Spanish line’ from Albéniz to Falla, via Granados. Felipe Pedrell had already used popular songs
in his magnificent opera La Celestina (never performed in Spain, to our shame)
and pointed the direction, but the masterstroke was left to Isaac Albéniz, who
employed the lyric depth of Andalusian song in his work. Years later Manuel de Falla fills his music
with such motifs pure and lovely in their far off, spectral form. The latest generation of Spanish composers:
Adolfo Salazar, Roberto Gerhard, Federico Mompou and our own Angel Barrios,
enthusiastic organizers of this festival, have set their glittering sights on
the pure revivifying fount of deep song and the delightful songs of Granada,
which might well be termed Castilian-Andalusian.
Note the transcendence of cante jondo, gentlemen, and how right our
people are in describing it as such. It
is deep, truly deep, more so than any well, more so than all the seas that
bathe the world, deeper than the present spirit that creates it or the voice that
sings it, because it is well-nigh infinite. It arises from remote peoples, traversing the
graveyard of the years, and the fronds of parched winds. It comes from the
first cry and the first kiss.
Not only the quintessential melodies of cante jondo, but the words too
are marvellous.
All we poets who truly concern ourselves, to a greater or lesser degree,
with pruning and nurturing the over-luxuriant lyric tree that the Romantics and
post-Romantics left us, are astounded by these poems.
The most profound gradations of Grief and Pain, in the service of the
purest and most exact expression, throb in the tercets and quatrains of the
siguiriya and its derivatives.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in all Spain to equal the
siguiriya, in style, atmosphere, or emotional truth.
The metaphors that fill our Andalusian songbook are almost always within
its orbit; the spiritual limbs of its verses are never disproportioned and are
able to grip our hearts in a definitive way.
It is strange and marvellous how the anonymous poet of the people can
capture the rare complexity of our highest moments of human feeling, in three
or four lines. There are songs where the
lyric tremor reaches a point attained by few poets:
A halo rings the
moon,
my love has died.
There is a much deeper mystery in these two lines than in all the plays
of Maeterlinck, simple genuine mystery, clear and sound, free of gloomy forests
and rudderless boats, it is the eternal vivid enigma of death.
A halo rings the moon,
my love has died.
Whether from the heart of the sierra, the orange groves of Seville, or
the harmonious Mediterranean shore, these songs have a common source: Love and
Death….but Love and Death as seen by the Sibyl, that deeply oriental character,
the true sphinx of Andalusia.
In the depths of all these poems a question lurks, but a terrible
question that has no answer. Our people
cross their arms in prayer, gaze at the stars, and await in vain a sign of
salvation. It is a gesture filled with
pathos, but a true one. The poem either
poses a profound and unanswerable emotional question, or resolves it in Death,
the question of questions.
Most of our region’s poetry (except for much of what is created in Seville)
possesses the foregoing characteristics. We are a sorrowful and ecstatic race.
As Turgenev viewed his countrymen; as Russian blood and marrow turned to
sphinxes, so I view many of our regional lyrics.
O sphinx of the
Andalusias!
You can knock there
on my door now,
I shall never rise
to open,
you shall listen to
my weeping.
Those lines hide behind an impenetrable veil, and rest awaiting some
passing Oedipus to wake and decipher them and return them to silence.
One of the most notable characteristics of the words of cante jondo is
the almost total absence of half-tones.
In the songs of Asturias, as in those of Castile, Catalonia, the Basque
Country and Galicia, there is a certain balance of sentiment, and a meditative
lyricism that lends itself to the expression of simple states of mind and naïve
feeling, which is almost entirely absent from Andalusian song. We Andalusians seldom notice half-tones. An Andalusian either cries to the stars or
kisses the red dust of the roadway. Half
tones do not exist for him. He slumbers
through them. And when on rare occasions
he uses them, he says:
What does it matter
to me
if a bird in the
‘poplar grove’
goes flying from
tree to tree.
And even in this song, in its feeling if not its architecture, we note a
marked Asturian affiliation. And thus,
the most striking characteristic of cante jondo is its emotiveness.
That is why, though many of the songs of our peninsula have the ability
to evoke the landscapes where they are sung, cante jondo sings like a sightless
nightingale, singing blindly, since both its passionate notes and ancient
melodies are best suited to the night….the azure night of our land.
Thus the capacity of many Spanish popular songs for plastic evocation
deprives them of the depth and intimacy of cante jondo.
Here is one song (among thousands) of Asturian musical lyricism that is a
prime example of such evocation.
Ay me, I’ve lost my
way
climbing this sad
mountain,
Ay me, I’ve lost my
way.
For God’s sake let
me pen
my lost sheep in
your cabin;
Among the swirling
clouds,
Ay me, I’ve lost my
way!
Let me pass the
night
in your hut, I say,
I have lost my way
in the misty light,
Ay me, I’ve lost my
way!
It is such a marvellous evocation of the mountain, with pine trees
swaying in the wind, so exact and real the feel of the track climbing towards
the peaks where the snow lies sleeping, so true the vision of that mist
ascending from the abyss to cloud the rocks with infinite shades of grey, that
it makes one forget the ‘honest shepherd’ who asks like a child for shelter of
the poem’s unknown shepherd girl. ‘It
leads one to forget the very essence of the poem.’ This song’s melody, with its monotonous
grey-green rhythm of misted landscapes, adds extraordinarily to the plasticity
of evocation.
By contrast, cante jondo always sings at night. It knows nothing of
morning or evening, mountain or plain. It knows only the night, a deep night
studded with stars. The rest is forgotten.
It is a song without landscape, concentrated in itself and terrible in
the shadows, shooting its golden arrows that pierce the heart. It is like a
formidable archer of azure whose quiver is never emptied.
The question everyone asks is: who created these poems, what anonymous
poet threw them onto the crude popular stage? A question to which there is no
answer.
Alfred Jeanroy, in his book Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France
au moyen age, writes that: ‘popular art is not simply confined to impersonal,
imprecise, and unconscious composition; it also comprises ‘individual’
composition adopted by the people and adapted to suit their own sensibility. Jeanroy is partially correct, but it needs
little sensibility to detect the creative source of such work, however savage
the colour with which it is painted. The people sing the songs of Melchor de
Palau, Salvador Rueda, Ventura Ruiz Aguilera, Manuel Machado and others, but
how vast a difference between the verses of such poets and those which the
people create! It is the gulf between an
artificial rose and a real one!
The poets who compose popular songs cloud the clear lymph of the living
heart; and how noticeable, in their poems, is the unpleasant studied rhythm of
the grammarian! We should take from the people nothing but the ultimate essence
and a few colouristic trills, and should never seek close imitation of their
ineffable modulations, because we will only blur them. Simply because we are
‘educated’.
True poems of cante jondo are attributable to no one at all but float on
the wind like golden thistledown and each generation clothes them in its own
distinctive colour, in releasing them to the future.
True poems of cante jondo are in essence tied to a weathervane of the
ideal that shows the direction of the winds of Time.
They are born of themselves, one more tree in the landscape; one more
stream in the poplar grove.
Woman, the heart of the world and immortal possessor of ‘the rose, the
lyre, and the science of harmony’ inhabits the endless horizons of these poems.
The woman of deep song is called Suffering…
It is admirable the way feeling begins to take shape in these lyrical
constructs and almost solidifies as a material thing. This is the case with
Suffering.
In these poems, Suffering takes on flesh, acquires human form, and
reveals a definite outline. She is the dark-haired woman who longs to catch
birds in the nets of the breeze.
All the poems of cante jondo are full of a magnificent pantheism,
consulting with earth, air, moon and seas, with things as simple as rosemary,
violets; some bird or other. All external objects take on precise personality,
and even play an active part in the lyrical action:
Amidst the sea
a rock was standing
my girl sat down
to tell her
suffering.
Only to Earth
will I tell my ruin,
in all the world
there’s none to
trust in.
I ask the rosemary
ask each morning
if love has cure,
for, oh, I’m dying.
The Andalusian, with a profound spiritual feeling, surrenders the most
intimate treasures to Nature completely confident of being heard.
One feature of cante jondo is the manner in which with admirable poetic
reality the wind materializes in many of the songs.
The wind emerges, personified, in moments of deepest feeling, appearing
like a giant preoccupied with bringing down the stars and scattering nebulae,
but in no other folksong have I heard him utter words of consolation as in
ours:
I climbed the wall;
the wind cried to
me:
‘Why these sighs,
when there’s no
remedy?’
It wept, the breeze,
to see wounds so
deep,
deep, deep in my
heart.
Enamoured of air
the air of woman,
since woman is air
in air I lingered.
I’m jealous of air
on your cheek, its
breath,
if the breeze were a
man
he’d be marked for
death.
I’ve no fear of
rowing,
if I want to I will.
I fear only the
breeze
from your bay
blowing still.
There is a delightful individuality about these poems, poems entangled
with the immobile propeller of the compass-rose.
Another theme peculiar to these songs and repeated endlessly in most of
them is that of weeping…
In the Gipsy siguiriya, the perfect poem of tears, the melody weeps as do
the words. There are lost bells in the depths, and windows open to the dawn.
At night in the yard
down my tears fall,
knowing I love you,
and you not at all.
Weep, weep my eyes,
weep if you’ve
reason,
no shame for a man
to cry for a woman.
If you see me cry
leave me my
handkerchief,
my pain is so great
it soothes me to
weep.
And this final one, Gipsy and Andalusian:
If my heart
possessed
windows, you could
look deep there, and
see
me weep drops of
blood.
These poems have an unmistakably popular feel, and in my judgment are the
ones best suited to the melodic pathos of cante jondo.
Their melancholy is so irresistible and their emotive force so
overwhelming, that they produce in all true Andalusians an inner weeping, a
weeping that cleanses the spirit transporting it to the burning lemon-grove of
Love.
Nothing compares to the delicacy and tenderness of these songs, and I
insist once more on the infamy we commit if we relegate them to oblivion or
prostitute them with base sensual intent, or through gross caricature. But that occurs only in the city, since,
fortunately for Virgin Poetry and for the poets, there are still sailors who
sing on the waves, women who rock their children to sleep in the shade of the
vines, and reclusive shepherds treading the mountain paths; and, adding fuel to
the flames which are not yet extinguished, the passionate winds of poetry will
rekindle the flames and the women beneath the vine’s shade will continue to
sing, and so will the shepherds on their rough paths, and sailors to the
fertile rhythms of the sea.
Just as in the siguiriya and its offspring the oldest elements of the
Orient are found, so in many of the poems employed by cante jondo their
affinity with the most ancient eastern songs is noticeable.
When our songs achieve extremes of Suffering and Love, they are sisters in
expression to the magnificent verses of the Arabic and Persian poets.
It is the simple truth that in the air of Cordoba and Granada the
gestures and lineaments of remote Arabia still linger, as clearly as the
evocation of lost cities rises from the blurred palimpsest of the Albaicín.
The same themes, of sacrifice, undying Love, and Wine, expressed with the
same spirit, appear in the works of the mysterious Asiatic poets.
The Arabic poet Siraj-al-Warak says:
The dove that does
pine
and so prevents
sleep,
has a breast like
mine,
where living fires
leap.
Ibn Sa ‘īd, another Arabic poet, writes, on the death of his mistress,
the same elegy an Andalusian countryman might have written:
Visit the tomb of
your lover,
my friends say, find
rest.
I reply: ‘Has she
another
tomb but in my
breast?’
But where the affinity is evident beyond question of coincidence is in
the sublime Amorous Ghazals of Hafiz, the national poet of Persia, who sang the
wine, beautiful women, mysterious stones, and infinite blue nights of Shiraz.
Since remote times art has employed the telegraphy and mirrors of the
stars.
Hafiz, in his Ghazals, reveals various lyric obsessions, among them an
exquisite obsession with hair.
Even if she could
not
love me, I would
trade
the whole orb of
Earth
for one thread of
her hair.
And later he writes:
My heart since
infancy
is lost in your dark
tresses
till death, so sweet
a bond
cannot break or be
undone.
The same obsession with hair is found in many of the songs of our own
unique cante jondo filled with allusions to tresses preserved in reliquaries,
the lock of hair on the brow that provokes a whole tragedy.
If I chance to die,
I charge you
bind my hands with
tresses,
bind them with your
long dark hair.
There is nothing more profoundly poetic than those three lines with their
sorrowful aristocratic eroticism.
When Hafiz treats the theme of lament he employs the same expressions as
our popular poet, with the same creative spectrum and, at heart, the same
sentiments:
I weep your loss forever,
but what use is
longing
if the breeze cannot
carry,
my sighs where you
may hear?
It is the same with:
I sigh into the air,
yet there’s none,
poor me,
who’ll pluck them
from the breeze!
Hafiz declares:
Now you’ll not hear
my voice’s echo,
now my heart is
plunged in sorrow,
and jets of burning
blood
invade my eyes.
And our poet:
Whenever I look at
the place
where we spoke when
we could,
these poor eyes, in
my face,
start weeping tears
of blood.
Or this terrifying song, a siguiriya:
That yearning I must
forget now for good,
now my heart weeps
tears of blood.
In his twenty-seventh ghazal the poet of Shiraz sings:
In the end my bones
will turn to dust in
the grave,
but my soul will
never
forget so fierce a
love.
Which is the exact same resolution proclaimed by countless songs of the
cante jondo. That Love is far stronger than Death.
It was therefore with great emotion that I read these Asiatic poems
translated into Spanish by Don Gaspar María de Nava published in Paris in 1838,
since they immediately evoked our own ‘deepest’ poetry.
Then, there is a strong affinity between our creators of siguiriyas and
the oriental poets in their praise of wine. Both groups sing the clear grape, the easeful
wine that recalls girls’ lips; a joyful wine, far from that fearful wine of
Baudelaire’s. I will cite one song (I
think it is a martinete), a rarity in that it is sung by a character who gives
his Christian name and surname (an isolated example among our singers) and in
whom I see personified all the true poets of Andalusia:
They call me Curro
Pulla
by land and by sea,
in the arch of the
tavern
I am the key.
In Curro Pulla’s songs it is praise of wine which is heard loudest. Like
the marvellous Omar Khayyam he knows that:
It will end, my
love,
it will end, my
weeping,
it will end, my
torment,
all will have an
ending.
Wreathing his brow with a crown of transient roses and gazing into a vase
filled with nectar, he watches a star fall into the depths…And like the
magnificent lyricist of Nishapur he perceives that life is a game of chess.
Cante jondo, then, Gentlemen is, as much for its melody as its words, one
of the most powerful creations of popular art in the world and to your hands
fall the tasks of preserving and dignifying it to the honour of Andalusia and
its people.
Before I bring this poor badly-constructed lecture to an end I want to
remember the marvellous singers, the cantaores thanks to whom cante jondo has
survived to this day.
The figure of the cantaor is delineated by two great paths; the arc of
the sky outside him and the zigzag track within that snakes through his heart.
The cantaor, in singing, celebrates a solemn rite, stirs ancient essences
from sleep and flings them furled in his voice into the wind…he has a
profoundly religious sense of song.
The race allows its suffering and its true history to escape through
their singing. They are simply mediums, lyrical summits of our people’s
experience.
Gazing, as they sing, at a brilliant and hallucinatory point quivering on
the horizon, they are both strange and simple.
The women sing soleares, a melancholy and human genre within relatively
easy reach of the heart; by contrast the men have preferred to cultivate the
marvellous Gipsy siguiriya…and almost all of them have been martyrs to an
irresistible passion for deep song. The
siguiriya is like a cautery that burns the heart, throat, and lips of those who
sing it. One must prepare against the
fire and sing at the right moment.
I wish to recall Romerillo, the spiritual Loco Mateo (Mateo Lasera),
Antonia ‘la de San Roque’, Anita ‘la de Ronda’, Dolores la Parrala and Juan
Breva who all sang soleares beyond compare, evoking the virgin Suffering, in the lemon-groves of Málaga or
beneath the night skies of maritime Cadiz.
I wish to recall also the masters of the siguiriya, Curro Pabla ‘el
Curro’, Manuel Molina, Manuel Torre (Manuel de Soto Loreto), and the marvellous
Silverio Franconetti, who sang the song of songs better than anyone else and
whose cry would split apart the dead mercury of the mirrors.
They were profound interpreters of the people’s soul who shattered their
own souls in tempests of feeling. Almost
all died of heart seizure, that is to say they exploded like giant cicadas
after filling our atmosphere with the rhythm of the ideal…
Ladies and Gentlemen: all of you who in the course of your life have been
moved by a far-off song heard on the road, all whose ripened hearts have been
pecked by the white dove of love, all the lovers of a tradition strung with
futures, whether you study books or plough the earth, I respectfully beg you
not to allow the precious living jewels of our race, our immense
thousand-year-old treasure studding the spiritual surface of Andalusia, to die,
and I beg you to meditate, beneath this Granadan night, on the transcendent
patriotism of a project which a small handful of Spanish artists are about to
present.
