Notes for: July 21, 2009
Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Turina were the successors to Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados as the standard-bearers for nationalism in Spanish classical music – that is, for the incorporation in serious concert music of Spanish folk idioms and folk lore. In fact, Albéniz himself converted the younger men in a dinner-table conversation while they were studying in Paris.
A native of Seville, Turina had graduated from Royal Conservatory in Madrid and had even written a zarazuela, a Spanish operetta. However, he had taken little serious interest in Spanish music, and at 23 had moved to Paris to study composition with composer Vincent D’Indy and to absorb the romantic tradition of D’Indy’s teacher, César Franck. Then, after the first Paris performance of Turina’s first published work, a piano quintet, Albéniz took de Falla and Turina to a café and lectured them on their responsibilities to their homeland. “We were three Spaniards,” Turina subsequently recalled, “gathered together in that corner of Paris, and it was our duty to fight for the national music of our country.”
When he was 32, consequently, Turina returned to Spain to perform as a pianist, conduct the Ballet Russes and the Theatro Real, and compose music using the Spanish idiom, including a large body of guitar music. In time he received the National Music Prize, was appointed professor of composition at the conservatory, and finally became the head of the general music department in the Spanish
Ministry of Education.
More than his Spanish contemporaries, Turina tried to cast his music in the traditional forms and instrumental groupings that he had learned in Paris. Thus, he produced a symphony, piano quintet, string quartet, piano quartet, two piano trios and two violin sonatas. But he freely adapted these forms to suit his own expressive ideas, and he imbued them with the folk rhythms and guitar styles of the different regions of Spain, in particular his native Andalusia.
This piano quartet, written when he was 49, departs from the classical quartet by omitting a long sonata-form first movement, following instead a movement sequence of lento-vivo-andante, and using the Franckian principle of tying the movements together with common themes.
Starting with a slow introduction, the first movement is a lyrical picture of a Spanish garden or countryside in the evening, using a swaying 6/8 theme. The second movement is livelier, with a theme of dance-like character and recalling at one point the first movement’s introduction. The third movement is a rhapsodic treatment of additional folk-like motives, alternating and concluding with themes from the first movement.