A prisoner once got his voice out of the bars. It happened in a Sevillian street: Pastor y Landero, where there was a prison near the bullring from which, according to the chronicler Félix González de León, the executions could be seen on an afternoon of work, thus being able to attend two death spectacles. Very different is this other event.
The 20th century began with convulsions when the musician Anta font attended a fleeting event: the step of theVirgin of Hope of Triana During the holy week. The carving continued its course between narrow spaces in which that master of the pentagram must have seen a soul escape from prison. Open a gap among the crowds and fly with this prayer: “Soleá, give me your hand, to the prison grate, I have many brothers, orphans from parents, and I have no one to protect me,” cried one of the inmates without the intention, that’s for sure, to inspire a sublime work with his gesture.
That prayer for freedom and clemency, of loneliness among a lot of people and request as a last resort, went through the author of ‘Amarguras’. This is how he composed a march that his father, Manuel Font Fernández, would later orchestrate: ‘Soleá, give me your hand’, a beautiful poem of quarter notes and eighth notes that has accompanied countless palios for more than a century. It is, in fact, one of the most popular of all marches.
“To the unfortunate prisoners in the Seville jail who, by singing arrows to the Virgin at Easter, made me conceive of this work,” he wrote on the paper, originally designed for piano. The composition was premiered before the Virgen de la Amargura as she passed by the Alameda de Hércules, on Palm Sunday in 1918, performed by the Municipal Band of Seville. In 1921 it reached the ears of Ingor Stravinsky. The famous Russian composer attended the Seville capital to enjoy his big week together with ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Seeing the canopy of the brotherhood of San Bernardo with this music behind his mantle, he said: “I am listening to what I see and seeing what I hear.”
It is curious that the jailer, a not too widespread style of saetas, is the most ornate of those sung today, coming from the most austere of corners. The professional interpreters took the expression of the prisoners to adapt it to a harmonious architecture of greater richness. The one created by Rogelio Barrera, a local artist from Huévar del Aljarafe, is an example of this.
The rage of the prison, the cante jondo as a tool to escape from the bars, also encouraged other talents throughout history. The journalist and poet Jose Maria Velazquez-Gaztelu, dean of the Flemish press, tells ABC this way: «When I was four years old I heard the arrows of the prisoners in front of my house. Whoever sang better could go out. That cry for freedom touched me in a special way and, since then, in every gathering, I have tried to solve the enigma of cante».
Composers, journalists, cantaores, poets… The sob of the one who laments in the shadow has the night twice black, that is why new paths for art are illuminated in his anxiety.