Manuel Blancafort (1897–1987)
6 Peces breus • 8 Peces per a piano • Jocs i danses al camp
• Cants íntims I
Manuel Blancafort lived through troubled times, witnessing
the end of a world view and a vision of art which had remained more or less
unchanged for hundreds of years, and the birth of the avant-garde music of the
twentieth century. Drawing on a wealth of internal inspiration however, he was
able to tread his own path and maintain his individuality. His inner world grew
from his experiences of nature, intimacy and memory, as well as life in his
home town of La Garriga. A somewhat withdrawn character, he had a tendency to
melancholy: “I always enjoyed silence and my own company, and I spent much of
my childhood alone, not needing outside entertainment,” he wrote in 1929.
Blancafort himself has said that he wrote most of his early
works after returning from long days spent in the mountains, in sunshine, wind,
fog or rain. Through music he could record his impressions, like pages in a
diary without words. Despite their obvious romantic character, these pieces
also display a clear concern for concision and structure: “Be wary of
Romanticism! Don’t deny, don’t betray your intelligence”. His discovery of
French and Russian music and the première of Albéniz’s Iberia were vital to his
development as a composer, opening up the musical direction he was to take.
Reacting against the predominance of Wagnerism at the time, Blancafort believed
that Catalan music should be characterised by clarity: “simple, without excessive
counterpoint or nebulous chromaticism which would drown out our lyrical
tradition’s purity of expression”.
His ideal of the non-improvised, non-spontaneous, balanced
“well-made work” and his understanding of the intimate were very much in line
with the sense of order and simplicity central to the Catalan
writer-philosopher Eugeni d’Ors’ Noucentisme (“20th-centuryism”) — a cultural
movement with political aspects, whose theoretical-aesthetic doctrine was drawn
up by D’Ors in 1908. Blancafort met him in 1918 at one of the cultural
gatherings at the Hotel Blancafort in La Garriga. D’Ors listened to music by
Blancafort and Frederic Mompou, who was also present, and the three men
discussed the new direction Catalan music should take. During his stay there,
D’Ors also read the pamphlet Le Coq et l’Arlequin, published that same year by
Jean Cocteau who had become the spokesman for the “Groupe des Six”: this was
their manifesto for the new trends in French music. Mompou had introduced his
younger colleague to these ideas, clearly mirroring their own views on the
future of music, and both composers would adopt them as their own.
This second volume of piano works continues where the first
left off, bringing to an end the first phase of Blancafort’s compositions for
the instrument. The works recorded here are for the most part short pieces
which either stand alone or are brought together to form suites, written in
ternary structure, with a sense of introspection and nostalgia as well as
touches of folk-music, and are, almost exclusively, composed in minor keys: “My
earliest piano works were very intimate pieces showing my love for simplicity
and for the characteristics of our native melodies”. The 6 Peces breus (6 Short
Pieces) and the 8 Peces per a piano (8 Piano Pieces) are clear examples of this
early style and the last in his series of piano miniatures. Blancafort was here
subconsciously creating a kind of “database” in that in addition to each piece
having its own intrinsic value, a number of them were re-used in later works,
often having been substantially reworked. Apart from anything else, the
miniature form, typical of the French school and popular with many European
composers at the time, allowed Blancafort to learn his trade and establish a
basis on which he was later able to construct larger symphonic works.
Essentially self-taught, he made up for any lack of formal training with
extreme compositional rigour, as can be seen in these works, and in the way he
revised his compositions, paying attention to the minutest of details, and
making modifications without losing any of the original freshness. The result:
exemplary work in terms of both construction and inspiration.
Jocs i danses al camp (Country Games and Dances) and Cants
íntims I (Intimate Songs I) were both composed in the years immediately before
his marriage to Helena París, their dedicatee, and are magnificent examples of
the dual nature of his music. His more playful, extrovert side is evident in
Jocs i danses al camp, which uses folk-based melodic material, while Cants
íntims I reflects his nostalgic, introspective side, through a more abstract
idiom. The two faces of a coin, they exemplify the aims of their composer:
“Music must be a medium for expressing internal sentiments and external impressions”.
In its original version, Jocs i danses al camp consisted of
five pieces (the sixth was added much later), which were accompanied by short
notes written by Blancafort to capture the playful nature of the cycle. The
first piece is headed, “S’ha perdut un anell a veure qui el troba...” (We’ve
lost the ring, let’s see who can find it…), and the music echoes the desperate
search with a lively rhythm (faster still in the central section), harsh
harmonies and an insistent inclusion of a disheartening Lento. A happy ending
seems to be suggested by the coda however, when a dance-like melody appears.
“Seguim l’ombra d’un núvol” (We follow the shadow of a cloud) portrays the
pursuit of a capricious shadow which ultimately evaporates, plunging the
pursuers into sadness. As a consolation, in the third piece Blancafort calls to
mind walking barefoot on the grass (“de peus descalços damunt l’herba”) and
dancing to the sound of a flabiol (a typical Catalan wind instrument) which has
its own tonada to play in the middle section. A more relaxed atmosphere comes
with the “Joc donant-se les mans” (Holding-hands game) and the serene dance
which bring a brief respite before the frenzied running about of part V (“Vine,
vine vine, vine! Corre, corre, corre!” — Come on, come on, come on! Run, run,
run!). Here the composer includes a “cant per anar a la guerra” (battle-song)
in the central section of the tripartite form, the nationalist character of
whose words are clear evidence of his deep-rooted love for his homeland. The cycle
ends in animated manner with one last reference to folk music: a sardana
(traditional Catalan dance).
Cants íntims I is characterized by a sense of agitation and,
at times, desolation — emotions that were part of that “incomprehensible
sadness” which had been with Blancafort since childhood. As in Jocs i danses al
camp the influence of both Mompou and contemporary French music can be
discerned in the lack of bars and barlines which results in unstable rhythms
and sweeping harmonies. The epigraphs introducing each piece underline the
extreme nature of this work, whose finale is disconcerting — a gentle lullaby
bringing to a close one of the composer’s most heartrending works. Ricardo
Viñes, the celebrated Catalan pianist who gave the first performances of many
works by Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Poulenc and Milhaud, would often programme this
work for his recitals, proof indeed of the growing esteem in which Blancafort’s
music was held in Europe’s musical circles.
Miquel Villalba
English Version: Susannah Howe