Jesús Guridi (1886–1961)
Piano Music
Although Jesús Guridi achieved his greatest successes in
the orchestral and operatic fields, he also wrote a
significant quantity of piano works. While his activity in
this area was intermittent, his piano compositions are
nonetheless a true reflection of his personal style, being
characterized by everything from grand operatic
gestures to the most subtle effects, as well as being
strongly influenced by folk-music.
Guridi was born in Vitoria in 1886. Having made
some early appearances in the musical circles of Bilbao,
he left Spain in 1904 to continue his studies in Paris,
Liège and Cologne. On his return he was appointed
director of the Bilbao Choral Society, for whom he
wrote a number of works, most notably the collections
of Basque folk-songs and one of his masterpieces, Así
cantan los chicos (1915), for chorus and orchestra. The
next year or so saw the first performances in Madrid of
his “Basque operatic idyll” Mirentxu (1915) and the
symphonic poem Una aventura de Don Quijote (1916).
He worked on his epic Basque opera Amaya over the
decade from 1910 to 1920, and another of his stage
works, the zarzuela El caserío (1926), proved to be one
of his greatest triumphs. This was followed by other
works in the same genre, including La meiga and La
cautiva.
Guridi achieved particular international renown
with the Diez melodías vascas (1941), a fine example of
a nationalist orchestral work, the Sinfonía pirenaica
(1946), the Homenaje a Walt Disney (1956) for piano
and orchestra, the String Quartet in A (1950), and the
Seis canciones castellanas (1943), among others. As
well as composing many highly regarded pieces for
organ, including the Tríptico del Buen Pastor, he also
wrote a number of film scores and composed incidental
music for the theatre. Organ professor of the Madrid
Conservatory for some years, Guridi was appointed its
director in 1956, remaining in the post until his death
five years later, by which time he had been distinguished
with many awards and honours.
Guridi’s piano works range from brief personal
sketches to large-scale fantasies for piano and orchestra.
His usual way of working was to create cycles of
independent pieces, generally based on Basque folkmusic,
limiting himself to a number of very specific
stylistic parameters, overall austerity and idiomatic or
atmospheric changes according to the character, poetic,
festive or dramatic, of the original melody.
There are certain similarities between the way he
uses folk-song elements in the Cantos populares vascos
(Basque Folk-Songs) and in his choral song collections.
The melodic lines are almost vocal in nature, and Guridi
restricts his use of pianistic formulas such as arpeggios,
repeated chords and changes in register. The harmonic
colour is determined by a typical, essentially diatonic
language, which constricts the sound-world of this
piece. Similar characteristics appear in the Ocho apuntes
(Eight Sketches), two-part imitative procedures, and
harmonizations inspired by eighteenth-century keyboard
music, with expressive, impressionistic touches such as
the imitation of the sound of flowing water, starting
from a single note and developing in intervals and rapid
figurations across various registers. The Tres piezas
breves (Three Short Pieces) are given a melancholy feel
by the minor key, and are composed as a single ternary
form with formal and rhythmic similarities between the
first and third pieces.
Guridi occasionally took his inspiration not from
Basque music but from Spanish folk-songs, as in his
Danzas viejas (Ancient Dances), musical commentaries
on poems by Victor Espinós, or in a series of works he
composed as incidental music, such as the Vals de
Mirentxu.
Both Vasconia and the Lamento e Imprecación de
Agar (Hagar’s Lament and Curse) provide an insight
into the way in which Guridi developed as a composer,
representing as they do a more advanced, sophisticated
stage in his work. The timbre and dynamics are more
complex, and there is greater harmonic density, while
the accompaniments are more elaborate and the formal
development more imaginative, allowing glimpses of
the symphonic Guridi. His re-creation of the Biblical
scene of Hagar in the desert shows a sense of drama and
the archaic: a monodic recitative like a hazy vision is
followed by a central section in which the theme is
developed by means of progressive modulation, before
the final recapitulation.
Santiago Gorostiza
English version: Susannah Howe