Manuel de Falla did not have time to concrete whar would have been a new dramatic-musical version of Maese Pedro´s puppet show, by Cervantes; but he managed to enter, at the end of his days, one of the most influential chapters for the music of the XX century, film making, and he explored the new integratio mechanisms of musical and literary rhetoric that the screen put at the artist´s disposal, comparable with the theatre context in which Falla was immersed since he started in 1927 the creation of Atlantis.
According to Elena Torres, Falla received several offers to prepare a cinematographic version of the play. According to Falla, he received a first offer of the prestigious German orchestra conductor Hermann Scherchen. But, according to the mail that has been kept, the definitive project of bringing the play to the screen came off thanks to the film studies San Miguel directed by Miguel Machinandiarena, about 1943. According to the data included in this research work, Luis Saslavsky was in the project –Argentine director, scripwriter and critic of the first period of taking films, well-known for the sophisticared visual composition of his plays–, as well as Alberto de Zabalía –considered to be, together with Saslavsky, the «great image artist of Argentine cinema»– and the Spanish playwright Alejandro Casona.
The main goal of Elena Torres Clemente´s thesis, under the supervision of Gemma Pérez and Yvan Nommick, of the University of Granada, has been, according to the author, “to determine the impact of the literary sources in the creation of the Spanish opera model gestated by Manuel de Falla”. To that end, the theatral experiences of the musician have been reconstructed and his two operas, Brief life and Maese Pedro´s puppet show have been analysed taking into account the connections between literary and musical parameters.
This is the first doctoral thesis on Manuel de Falla prepared in the University of Granada, and the second one in Spain. The author studies the two finished operas of the musician, Brief life and Maese Pedro´s puppet show, centring on the relations between the musical and the literary speech. At clear variance with the mythologizing bibliography about Falla until the eighties, the author has taken as a starting point the wide collection housed in the composer´s personal archive, many of which remained unpublished. Particularly, handwritten notes included in the volumes of his library, the rich epistolary collection, composed of more than 20,000 letters, and the composer´s manuscripts and first drafts have been of great interest. We must add the hemerographic references found in French archives and handwritten librettos of Brief life housed in the Archive Fernández-Shaw, unknown so far.
All the bibliography on Manuel de Falla has insisted, so far, that Spanish theatres were not interested in “Brief life”. For that reason Falla decided to go to France, to premiere the work. However, Elena Torres´ thesis reveals that both the Teatro de la Zarzuela and the Teatro Real, the two most important musical companies in Spain, were interested in staging the opera.
Tha author has reconstructed the historical circumstances that caused the creation and first performance of Brief life and Maese Pedro´s puppet show, as well as getting to know the continual relations of Falla with theatre, illustrated with about twenty unsuccessful musical projects that reveal the musician´s stage interests. Among them, it has been discovered the existence of a one-act farce conceived in 1920 in collaboration with Carlos Arniches and a chamber ballet inspired by some verses by Antonio Machado, planned in 1921 together with Cipriano Rivas Cherif and La Argentina.
This research work, that has been possible thanks to the institutional support of the University of Granada, where the author has enjoyed a Scholarship of Training for Teaching and Research Staff of the Andalusian Council and the Archive Manuel de Falla, is an unavoidable reference for future reseach works on both Spanish and foreign dramatic-musical works, as it contributes a new analysis method centred on the connections between musical and literary parameters.
Reference: Elena Torres Clemente
Department of Art History. University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 120174.
E-mail: torresclemente@eresmas.com
