Poet in Spain
by Federico García Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Arvio
Knopf, 517 pp., $35.00
Courtesy of The New York Review of Books
In his late teens, Federico García Lorca’s main interest was music and song. He was steeped not only in the Andalusian folk tradition but also in the European art song. He loved the work of Schubert and Beethoven.
Lorca’s arrangements for piano and voice of Andalusian folk songs, inspired by Manuel de Falla’s arrangement in 1914 of seven other Spanish songs, combine in the subtlety of their harmonies an attention to the European art tradition and to local expression. Lorca’s own voice, according to his contemporaries, was not very rich, but his playing was sophisticated and skillful, as can be attested by the series of recordings he made in 1931 accompanying Encarnación López, known as La Argentinita, the lover of his friend the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, whose death Lorca lamented in one of his most famous poems. His piano accompaniment on these songs can be exuberant, but it can be subdued as well. He believed in the concept of duende, a heightened soulfulness displaying an authentic, deep, and earthy emotion, but he was also a master of restraint. [Read more…]