Whose Spain?: Negotiating “Spanish Music” in Paris, 1908–1929 by Samuel Llano (review)

Abstract

Whose Spain?: Negotiating Music in Paris, 1908-1929. By Samuel Llano. (Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xxii, 270 p. ISBN 9780199858460. $55.] Bibliography, index. In this thought-provoking study, Samuel Llano revisits, from a fresh viewpoint, much-maligned tendency of French critics in decades surrounding World War I to exoticize Spanish music. Llano establishes this new framework by building on work of Hispanists such as Emilio Ros-Fabregas, first scholar, to best of my knowledge, who located origins of critical trope known as mysticism, which first surfaced in writings by August Wilhelm Ambros, but over which early-twentieth-century French critics such as Henri Collet enthused far more voluminously (Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Historiograffa de la miisica en las catedrales espaiiolas: Positivismo y nacionalismo en la investigacion musicologica, Codex XXI 1 [1998]: 68-135). Llano also elaborates on rift between so-called Teutonic and Latin aesthetics, obsession among cultural spokespersons during that cataclysm some in France still call la Grand Guerre. In light of centenary of war, Llano's research is as timely as his insights are welcome. His coverage of postwar period also fills a lacuna in Spanish music scholarship while complementing, to some degree, pathbreaking studies such as Tamara Levitz's microhistory of Paris premiere of Stravinsky's Persephone (Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Persephone [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012]). For all these reasons, Whose Spain ? received Robert M. Stevenson Award in 2013, a prize conferred by American Musicological Society for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music. It is clear that some daunting challenges present themselves. Critics such as Collet were not only verbose but obscure in their effusions on Spanish music. (Joaquin Nin-Culmell, composer and former student of Manuel de Falla, once rather generously described Collet to me as an odd bird.) Political and social subtexts and metaphors lurk at every turn, waiting to be unpacked. As Llano observes, one of Collet's meanderings anticipates the hybrid [racial] formulation of Spanish identity and history that historian Americo Castro would uphold, more famously and polemically, in his Espana y su historia (1948)--written in exile from Franco dictatorship (p. 28). The primary source materials Llano painstakingly collected, with their frequent flights of bombast, are thus backbone of his study, and discourse analysis, including translation, his primary tool. There is much to admire about ways in which Llano addresses these challenges. First, simply by approaching Spanish music from a French perspective, a new focus emerges. Refining term exoticism, which has become a catchword that masks a variety of practices and experiences (p. xvii), author provides a wealth of new factual information, discussing, for example, Semaine espagnole of 1919 (p. 22) and Alexandre Bailly's sets for Paris production of Manuel de Falla's La vie breve (La vida breve), which took place in January 1914 (pp. 141-42). The same can be said for discussion of homage to Falla held at Opera-Comique in 1928, event that been chronically misdated and thus overlooked. (The fact that author and I differ on feminist inclinations of feisty female protagonist of El amor brujo, mentioned on p. 204, only reflects richness of critical concepts in Falla's oeuvre that remain to be pondered.) Indeed, if any scholar were to write a monograph on Falla's relationship to France, Whose Spain? would serve as apt point of departure, since Llano describes highlights of composer's experience at a level of detail impossible in more comprehensive life-work studies. One hopes Llano might take up this project himself someday. Through eyes of Collet and other hispanisles, Llano also enhances our understanding of Lalinile in terms of Russian, French, and Spanish aesthetic sensibilities, which other scholars have discussed apropos Ballets Russes (pp. …