A voice from the forge sings a traditional Andalusian verse: “¡Malhaya el hombre, malhaya, que nace con negro sino! ¡Malhaya quien nace yunque en vez de nacer martillo!” (Luckless the man, luckless, who is born with a dark fate! Luckless the one born an anvil instead of a hammer!) The caged, dying bird and the hammer blows of fate are clear omens of the tragedy-in-the-making, but there are also the cries of street vendors and the suggestion of dance music – ambient ironies that are not lost on the grandmother.ĭespite their vow of eternal love, he abandons her to marry a richer woman, Carmela. The grandmother appears with some birds in a cage, one of which may be dying, perhaps of love, the grandmother suspects, like Salud. To one side is a blacksmith’s forge, from which comes rhythmic hammering and singing. The first act takes place in the courtyard of the house where Salud lives with her grandmother in the Albaicín quarter of Granada. The plot concerns the brief life and love of the gypsy girl Salud, who has been seduced by Paco, a fashionable upper-class youth.
The Opéra Comique in Paris presented it in January 1914, and it was staged triumphantly in Madrid shortly after Falla’s return. It was finally accepted at the Casino Municipal in Nice in 1913. Encouraged by French musicians – particularly Paul Dukas – Falla continued to pitch La vida breve to theaters from Milan to London. He ended up living in Paris for the next seven years, returning to Spain only with the outbreak of World War I. The promised production of the work, however, did not take place, and it was still unperformed when Falla left Spain in 1907 to tour in France as a piano accompanist. Orchestration: 3 flutes (3 = piccolo), 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (anvils, bass drum, bells, castanets, cymbals, snare drum, glockenspiel, tam-tam, and triangle), celesta, guitar, 2 harps, strings, chorus, and soloistsįirst Los Angeles Philharmonic performance:įalla had little success with the six zarzuelas he wrote in the first years of the 20th century, but in 1905 he won an opera competition in Madrid with the two-act La vida breve (The Brief Life), on a libretto by Carlos Fernández Shaw.
0 kommentar(er)
