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18 MANUEL DE FALLA
In 1918, Henry Prunières asked the leading composers of the day to contribute to a
special number of
La Revue Musicale
in memory of Claude Debussy. Falla’s
Homenaje
proved to be a sombre funerary habanera, the coda of which quotes
La Soirée
dans Grenade
, an affectionate tribute from a Spaniard for whom the Debussyan
revolution had not been in vain.
The way now lay wide open for one of the major keyboard works of the twentieth
century: the
Fantasía bætica
, commissioned by Arthur Rubinstein. Here the piano
is treated as a percussive instrument, and employs a vocabulary influenced by
flamenco: guitaristic figuration abounds; we hear the inextinguishable
taconeo
of the dancers’ tapping feet; the long melismatic phrases replete with ornaments
are precisely modelled on the vocal line of the
cantaor
– yet the whole is contained
within an eminently classical
A-B-A
structure.
The work was completed in 1919. Rubinstein, initially disconcerted by its
dimensions (for all that Falla had reminded him that Andalusia was his favourite
province in Spain,
1
the pianist was probably hoping for a character piece in the style
of the ‘Ritual Fire Dance’), premiered it in NewYork the following year, then rapidly
abandoned it . . .
In 1922 Falla transcribed the
Song of the Volga Boatmen
for piano at the request of
his friend Ricardo Baeza: the astounding harmonies and the gloomy, hieratic
character of this short piece recur in his final piano work,
Pour le Tombeau de Paul
Dukas
(Memorial for Paul Dukas), which Prunières commissioned fromhim in 1935,
‘solemn and powerful . . . static like a block of stone’, as the composer himself put it
1. ‘Bætica’ was the Roman name forAndalusia. (Translator’s note).