The publication of an epistolary is always great news: it allows us to know the depth of people who no longer exist in superlative intimacy. Old letters, yellowed postcards or obsolete telegrams give the possibility of peeking into that relationship that distance forced to put in writing and that time has bequeathed to later generations. From this perspective, the interest is great: reproduce the communications of beings of the past as they took place. When these are also considered protagonists of an era, a discipline or a change, the attraction for them is accentuated.
This is the particular case of Manuel de Falla and Wanda Landowskawhose epistolary has just been Posted by Sophie Lamberbourg on the Editorial University of Granada. This edition comes to reflect the intense artistic and personal connection that the composer and the harpsichordist maintained between 1922 and 1931, a period in which musical creation was reconsidered from its deepest foundations of thought while the world tried to rebuild itself.
She, of Polish origin, had started a battle at the beginning of the 20th century to recover an extinct instrument: the harpsichord or harpsichord. He, a native of Cádiz, had been questioning the composition as a profound expression of popular song in the midst of a crisis in national opera. The two meet in Paris, the shared homeland of those who were looking for an opportunity with full creative freedom, although a friendship like theirs would not develop until years later. The outbreak of World War I made their paths separate, time in which their respective careers were sublimated. Nearly a decade later, lost all contact, the mediation of the critic Adolfo Salazar made the reunion possible: first by letter and then personally. It was September 1922.
Falla and Landowska’s relationship is part of a friendship that arose from the deep admiration that both protagonists professed. This mutual sympathy was the seed of a good part of the new movement that was beginning to simmer: the musical neoclassicism. That is why the study of this epistolary should not be understood as a fight of opposites, between the humanism What is supposed to be in a book like this and the humanity of its protagonists, because in them too the essence came first and then the intelligence. It is, therefore, an exercise in sociology of music with a wide network of capillaries in epistolography, comparative studies or analysis, all of them as auxiliary sciences that make the heart of the new musicology beat strongly.
Together with an instrument —the harpsichord— and a city —Granada— both protagonists make up a kind of tetrarchy responsible for the huge music revolution that occurred as a consequence. Landowska, who had been betting on the recovery of an instrument exhibited as a museum rarity since the beginning of the 20th century, had even obtained the trust of the Pleyel company, which began to mass-produce the instruments designed by the performer. But she was not satisfied with this yet: she wanted new music. Falla, since October 1918, was composing ‘The altarpiece of Master Pedro’ at the request of the multimillionaire princess of Polignac. The composer had set the work in a couple of chapters from Cervantes’ immortal ‘Don Quixote’, and was debating over which ancient instrument to reserve a role for. It is precisely at this moment that the two meet again in Granada, from which point Falla will not only complete his work thanks to Landowska’s invaluable advice —the first modern composition for harpsichord—, but will also promise him the realization of what he later it was the ‘Concerto per clavicembalo (or pianoforte), flute, oboe, clarinetto, violino e violoncello’ (1926), dedicated to her.
It is from then on when the friendship —from the Latin ‘amare’: to love— it unleashes without limits. Mutual consideration impresses with its purity and personal, family, truly sincere and deep interest is embedded in each document. A good part of it shines through in the preliminary study which, together with the notes and comments prepared by Sophie Lambergourg for this collection of correspondence, captivate the reader. The decision to carry out a useful bilingual edition that allows a more direct approach to the way in which both communicated, reviving the memories of when the ‘lingua franca’ was genuinely French.
This volume is added to two others that, belonging to the publishing project Epistolary Manual of Failure from the Musicology Collection, focus attention on the musician’s links with other cultural figures of his time: the politician Leopoldo Matos y Massieu (2019) and the literary authors Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Lejárraga (2019). This series, exemplary in its methodology, specialized in its study and crystalline in its presentation, has been possible thanks to an important R+D+i project that, directed by professors Joaquín López González and Antonio Martín Moreno, begins to draw light the enormous collection of correspondence —more than 23,000 documents— that is kept by the Manuel de Falla Archive in Granada.
With Landowska it was the (re)birth of the harpsichord; with Falla the past (re) returns like a pure spring; Granada witnessed that (re)new (re)encounter. Now is the privileged moment to (re)live all that by participating in the conversations that the “Ribera monk” and the “clave priestess” quintessentialed in their very personal conversations. Travelers in time among crossed letters.
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Title: ‘Epistolary Manual of Failure – Wanda Landowska (1922-1931)’
Author: Edited by Sophie Lamberbourg
Editorial: Editorial University of Granada
Year of edition: 2022
Available at Editorial University of Granada
Available on Unebook