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**For Full Program Notes & Translations, please see the “Program” section of the Jorgesen Digital Stage site below**
Please note: Due to a program change, program notes/texts and translations are not available for “Habanera” from Carmen.

“Clavelitos”
Joaquín “Quinito” Valverde Sanjuán
(Born January 2, 1875 in Madrid; died November 4, 1918 in Mexico City)

Valaverde was best known as a Spanish composer of zarzuelas. Valverde, whose music became known internationally, was usually called Quinito Valverde to distinguish him from his father, Joaquín "Quinito” Valverde Duran, who also wrote zarzuelas.

Zarzuela, sometimes called Spanish opera, is actually a form of Spanish theatre that contains music. With characters usually drawn from the working classes, the dramatic action moves in an alternating combination of song and speech. During his short lifetime, Valverde was known as the "Tango King", the Franz Lehar of Spanish music, and the "Spanish Offenbach.” Now he is perhaps best known for this brief song called "Clavelitos" (“Little Carnations”).

Valverde was a student of his father and studied at the Conservatory; he showed early promise, writing his first zarzuela Con las de Caín at the age of 15. As an adult, unusually, much of his best work was created in collaboration with other composers. After his father died, Valaverde moved to Paris, where he had great success. His work was also successful in the United States, on Broadway, where two of his works, A Night in Spain and The Land of Joy, were presented in the 1917-1918 season.

The high spirited and energetic song "Clavelitos” with words by José Juan Cadenas, makes reference to traditional flamenco. Distinguished by its recurring sixteenth-note triplets, the song became a part of the repertory of many Spanish opera stars in the early part of the 20th century, when several versions of the piece were recorded. A light song, it is known as a patter song because of its very fast lyrics; its subjects are selling carnations and love. It was first performed by Fornarina on September 25, 1907.

“Clavelitos”

Mocita dame el clavel,
Dame el clavel de tu boca,
Que pa' eso no hay que tener
Mucha vergüenza ni poca.
Yo te daré el cascabel,
Te lo prometo mocita,
Si tú me das esa miel
Que llevas en la boquita.

Clavelitos, clavelitos,
Clavelitos de mi corazón
Yo te traigo clavelitos
Colorados igual que un fresón.
Si algún día clavelitos
No lograra poderte traer,
No te creas que ya no te quiero,
Es que no te los pude coger.

La tarde que a media luz
Vi tu boquita de guinda,
Yo no he visto en Santa Cruz
Otra boquita más linda.
Y luego al ver el clavel
Que llevabas en el pelo,
Mirándolo creí ver
Un pedacito de cielo.

Maiden give me the carnation,
Give me the carnation of your mouth,
For that you don't have to have
A lot of shame or little.
I'll give you the bell,
I promise you maiden,
If you give me that honey
You carry in your mouth.

Carnations, carnations,
Carnations of my heart.
Today I bring you carnations
As red as a strawberry.
If someday carnations
I can't bring you,
Don't believe that I don't love you,
Is that I couldn't bring them.

The barely lit evening
When I saw your cherry mouth,
I haven't seen in Santa Cruz
A prettier mouth.
And then when I saw the carnation
That you wore in your hair,
Looking at it I thought I've seen
A piece of heaven

Canciones populares Espagnolas
Manuel de Falla
(Born November 23, 1876, in Cadiz, Spain;
died November 14, 1946, in Alta Gracia, Argentina)

Manuel de Falla, the greatest Spanish composer of the 20th century, was educated in Madrid and studied with Pedrell, the founder of the Spanish nationalist school. He then went off to live and work in Paris, where he became a well known figure as a friend of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Dukas, Turina, and Garcia Lorca. With Garcia Lorca, he organized the famous Cante Jondo competition in Granada. Even during his time in France, the folksongs and dances of Spain and its art music, too, were his constant inspiration; he combined them with features of the two great esthetic movements of his time, impressionism and neo-classicism, to create many fascinating works of great originality.

De Falla began to write the Siete canciones populares espanolas (“Seven Spanish Folk Songs”), in Paris in 1914 and completed them in 1915 in Madrid, where he had returned after the outbreak of World War I. (One of the composer’s Spanish pupils, Ernesto Halffter, later prepared a small orchestral version of the set. His friend, the Polish-American violinist Paul Kochanski (1887-1934), arranged six of the seven songs into a Suite in a collaborative effort with de Falla, omitting the Seguidilla murciana.) Although Spanish folksong inspired de Falla, and he went to listen to the dances and songs of the peasants with Lorca, he made use of folksongs in their traditional form only once, and that was in these songs, which were all, however, based on works already in print.

The seven songs are “El paño moruno” (“The Moorish Cloth”), a well-known song of the province of Murcia. The Moorish rhythm in the accompaniment is most haunting. Its tale of stained fabric that must be sold at discount has sexual overtones. De Falla actually used the theme of the first measures of the accompaniment to this song again in The Three Cornered Hat for the miller. “Seguidilla murciana,” a rough and tough muleteer’s dance song, is a Spanish folk poem in rather quick triple meter. “Asturiana,” a sweet lament from northern Spain, follows; its presence is unusual because, in de Falla’s music, the south is more often present. De Falla knew the lament because his mother had sung it to him in his infancy. Jota, an Aragonese dance-song of love, is written entirely in the style of folk music.

Nana, a lovely Andalusian lullaby that the composer’s mother had sung to him, follows, and then,“Canción,” simply “song,” but with a complex structure in both words and music. “Polo,” a flamenco song of unhappy love, expresses the tragic sense of life.The gypsies brought a new musical style from the East, and it evolved into this form, which includes gypsy elements such as the repetition of the same note over and over again and the cry “Ay!” a ritualistic cry of woe, which generally comes just before improvisation.(“Ay!I have a pain in my heart and can speak of it to no one. Curses on love and on him who made me know it! Ay!”).

“Ah! Quel diner” from La Perichole
Jacques [Jacob] Offenbach
(Born June 1819 in Cologne, Germany; died October 5, 1880 in Paris)

Offenbach is generally known as a composer of light and amusing opéra bouffes (a general term for operettas or light opera) for which Rossini nicknamed him the “Mozart of the Champs-Elysées.” Opéra bouffes is a genre of late 19th century French operetta; it, as a genre, is associated with Offenbach, who wrote most of them. Although Offenbach wrote the majority of his works in French, he was the son of a cantor in Germany and retained his German accent, which was often caricatured, all his life. His most significant success in popular music in the 19th century occurred in great measure because he composed remarkably happy and tuneful music that a large public adored.

La Périchole is an opéra bouffe in three acts; it premiered October 6, 1868. Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy wrote its French libretto based on the 1829 one-act play, Le carrosse du Saint-Sacrement by Prosper Mérimée. La Périchole, the title character, is based on Micaela Villegas, a well-known 18th century Peruvian entertainer and the famous mistress of Manuel de Amat y Juniet, Viceroy of Peru from 1761 to 1776. The story tells of two poor Peruvian street-singers, too poor to afford a marriage license, as well as a lecherous viceroy, Don Andrès de Ribeira, who wishes to make La Périchole his mistress.

The Viceroy, who found La Périchole beautiful, offers her the opportunity to be the lady-in-waiting for his wife (although he does not have a wife.) Knowing well what she might have to give him in exchange for position, she accepts anyway because she has nearly reached an unsustainable position of starvation; consequently, she has to write a farewell letter to Piquillo, with whom she is in love. He becomes so overcome with sadness when he reads the letter that he decides to hang himself. The viceroy is warned that no lady can live in the palace if she is unmarried, and although he then is willing for her to be wed to any unsuspecting gentlemen, she is actually given to Piquillo, who, at the time, is trying to hang himself as he is so devastated at Péricole’s earlier disappearance. After drinking to excess and sated from her large dinner, she becomes very tipsy, and sings what is known as her tipsy aria, “Ah! quel diner je viens de faire.” (“What a meal I have just had.”) When she sings, she is so inebriated from many glasses of wine that she does not even recognize her beloved Piquillo.

3 Canciones from Espanolas Antiguas (“La Tarara,” “Nana de Sevilla,” and “Sevillanas del S. XVIII”)
Frederico Garci-Lorca
(Born June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada, Spain;
died August 18 or 19, 1936, between Víznar and Alfacar, Spain)

Son of a prosperous farm owner and a pianist, prominent 20th century Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca, a Spanish literary figure of international acclaim, studied law at the University of Granada before moving to Madrid in 1919 to focus on his writing. In Madrid, he became part of a group of avant-garde artists that included Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. Over the course of his career, Lorca published numerous volumes of poetry. In 1920, he settled in Granada, which became his permanent residence. He traveled to New York City, where he found a connection between Spanish songs and the African American spirituals he heard in Harlem.

Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent professionally. In August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested at his country home in Granada by Francisco Franco’s soldiers. He was executed by a firing squad a few days later.

Garcia Lorca was a longtime friend of the composer Manuel de Falla, whom he met when he was just out of his teens. Garcia-Lorca’s own musical activity was various: he was a composer, folklorist, and concert performer. Ian Gibson, in his biography of Lorca, points out that he not only was said to have hummed melodies before he could talk, but he also had musical training at an early age. By the time he was eleven, he was studying piano in Granada with Antonio Segura and Francisco Benítez. Gibson understood Lorca’s professional writing career and musical achievements were all of a piece: “Lorca’s life and works cannot be understood if one does not take into account the fact that Federico was a born musician.” Many of Lorca’s musical compositions were left unfinished, but all his work in music displays the fact that he had a thorough knowledge of traditional music.

His Canciones have simple but effective accompaniments which emphasize rhythm and harmony. Especially at the point when they were written, they carried great significance in Spanish culture. Lorca often performed his Canciones in public, gathering large audiences and helping to popularize the continued presence of Spanish music.

Tres Canciones Españolas Antiguas come from a collection of Spanish folk songs and ancient melodies that Lorca harmonically realized and arranged. Lorca collected and arranged many Spanish folk songs, particularly from his native Andalusian region in the south. Unusually, in 1931, ten pieces from Canciones Españolas Antiguas were originally published solely on 78 rpm records with García Lorca himself at the piano, accompanying the then-celebrated singer/dancer La Argentinita. The many transcriptions and arrangements of the Canciones Populares antiguas were only created posthumously because García Lorca refused to write down his arrangements of his songs. Not wanting to transcribe his arrangements was a way to endorse the history of the oral tradition. He felt that musical notation could not indicate the characteristic microtonal and rhythmic complexities inherent in oral music.

Lorca wrote a lecture/essay, El cante jondo, for the cante jondo festival in Granada in 1922. It dealt with the history and techniques of flamenco singing and made the point that the guitarist is as important as the singer.

In a lecture at Vassar College on Ancient Spanish Lullabies, in 1930, Lorca explained that Spanish lullabies, unlike lullabies sung in other European countries, are not soft and sweet, but alert the child to dangers he/she may experience when the mother is no longer protecting him/her.

“Nana de Sevilla” is an unsettling lullaby of the kind that Lorca mentioned in his lecture. It tells of a baby whose Gypsy mother abandoned it. Lorca tells of his inspiration for this song, “Some years ago, walking close to Granada, I heard a woman of the village singing as she rocked her child to sleep. I had always noticed the keen sadness of the cradle songs of our country, but I had never felt this truth as clearly as I did then… As I drew closer to the singer in order to write down the song, I noticed that she was a beautiful Andalusian lady, cheerful, without any air of melancholy, but she was imbued with a living tradition and followed its commands faithfully, as though listening to ancient voices flowing in her blood.”

The lively “Sevillanas del Siglo XVIII” (“Sevillanas of the 18th century”) takes its name and spirit from the fast, triple rhythms of the distinctive cople dance from Seville, an Andalusian variant of the Castilian seguidilla. The dance is performed to a traditional type of verse of four or seven lines. The Triana neighborhood in Seville, a place where flamenco is popular, is mentioned in the poem.

The jaunty style of Lorca’s very popular song, “La Tarara” has often been traced back to its Castilian roots. It is a very old children’s song that has many regional variants. Lorca may have heard a specific one in Andalusia. “La Tarara” is a free-spirited, dancing girl, who likes to wear untraditional or somewhat outrageous clothing.

“Granada”
Agustin Lara
(Born in Mexico City in 1897;
died Nov. 5, 1970 in Mexico City)

One of Mexico's most famous songwriters, Agustin Lara wrote many songs in a variety of Mexican song styles that are still favorites, including the 1932 song "Granada," about the fascinating city in the south of Spain, home of the famed Alhambra. He composed not only the music but also the lyrics to the popular “Granada.”

Lara composed most of what are now legendary songs between 1930 and 1939, while he toured South America, performing often on national radio. He also composed for films from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s, before his fame became international.

Shéhérazade
Maurice Ravel
(Born March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France;
died December 28, 1937, in Paris)

Ravel was born in France, only a short distance from the Spanish border, to a French father and a Basque mother. Although his family moved to Paris when he was just an infant, he was always attached to the region of his birth and composed several works of Spanish inspiration.

His exotic Shéhérazade, a cycle of three songs composed in 1903, is the work of a young composer whose most remarkable music at this period was written for the piano. He was still studying composition at the Paris Conservatoire when, in 1897, he had the idea of writing a festival overture, a work which, he admitted, was “rather strongly influenced by Russian music.” Six years later, his continuing fascination with Russian music resulted in this dazzling tribute to Russia, replete with shimmering and incessantly modulating harmonies.

The short cycle Shéhérazade, settings of three poems from a collection of that name by the composer’s friend Tristan Klingsor, was completed the year that Klingsor, a.k.a. Justin Léon Leclère, published his collection of 100 poems with its literary source, The Arabian Nights. Ravel, drawn to the exoticism and rhythmic freedom he found in Klingsor’s poetry, immediately set this group of three poems.

Klingsor was surprised by Ravel’s choice of poems: “He did not linger over those poems which by dint of their melodic phrasing could easily mutate into songs. Instead, he took the ones that had a more descriptive air to them and even those, which like “Asie,” with its long sentences, seemed not to lend themselves easily to the execution of such a plan. For him, setting a poem to music was to transform it into an expressive recitative and to raise the inflections of the spoken word to the level of song, to raise up all the possibilities of the word, not to subjugate them.”

These three bright, brilliant, and finely harmonized songs, which make up the grouping of Shéhérazade, premiered in May 17, 1904. They conjure an imaginary, voluptuous Orient, filled with sensuous pseudo-oriental imagery. Ravel creates an intoxicating feverish, sensual universe in which beauty, desire, and brutal violence forge an alarming mélange. Fascinated by the Orient, Ravel also toyed early in his career with the idea of an opera based on the tales of The Thousand and One Nights.

In these songs, operatic influence and the lyricism of Rimsky-Korsakov are evident, particularly in the first and most protracted of the three songs, “Asie,” which is conceived much like a lyric scene.

“Asie” was dedicated to the mezzo-soprano Jeanne Hatto (Marguerite Jeanne Frere), for whose benefit Ravel had Klingsor change the word 'pipe' to 'tasse' towards the end of the poem at the line, “En élevant comme Sindbad ma vieille tasse arabe.” The poem is full of magnificently illustrated images, which the music fully expresses, some from Damascus as well as from cities in Persia with minarets and many various kinds of people including merchants and executioners. Yet somehow there is a sense that the French qualities of Debussy are present in Ravel’s languorous harmonies, even though aria and recitative merge to present the feeling of foreign lands. The vocal line aims for a natural style of recitation, sometimes quite close to the delivery and accents of speech, but it still contains the fullness of the evocations of the sumptuous yet cruel Orient that it evokes.

The second song, “La Flûte enchantée” brings to life the reverie of a young woman listening to her lover’s flute while her master sleeps. Ravel dedicated it to the society hostess Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, at whose salon Colette had first met Ravel. She hears her lover's flute with music of sadness and of joy, each note like a mysterious kiss on her cheek, as she stands by the casement. A very sensual dialogue is created between the two voices of the singer and the flute.

In lascivious, powerfully melancholy music, “L’Indifférent” evokes an androgynous young man whom the female narrator fails to entice into her house. He refuses with a graceful gesture. The song is dedicated to Emma Bardac, who was then married to the banker Sigismond Bardac. She, after having been Fauré’s mistress, and before marrying Debussy, was interested in Ravel. The dedication seems somewhat heartless, however, if the composer was truly confirming that she left him . . . “indifferent.”

In the song, the singer sees a handsome young man at her doorstep, singing in a strange and charming language. His departure is reflected in the fading away of the short postlude.

“Seguidilla” from the Opera, Carmen
Georges Bizet
(Born October 25, 1838, in Paris; died June 3, 1875, in Bougival, France)

One of the most popular operas in today’s repertoire is Bizet’s Carmen, which was not a success when it debuted. Carmen was labeled “obscene,” and the music was declared to be obscure and devoid of color; detractors also felt it was an unoriginal and undistinguished in melody. The opera was judged “altogether undramatic,” but today it is deemed one of the most colorful operas. It is a simply and directly told story of a Spanish Gypsy girl, Carmen, who did not care what fate befell the men she chose to satisfy her great appetite for love.

Carmen was first performed on March 3, 1875, at the Paris Opera-Comique three months before Bizet died. One of the very popular pieces from it is the Seguidilla, the dance that Carmen sings as a seductive aria in Act I. After she is arrested for fighting with another girl in the cigarette factory where she works, Don Jose is assigned to watch her. She sings that she wants to go to her friend Lillias Pastia's inn and insinuates that she would like him to go with her. It borrows both harmonic and rhythmical features from flamenco.