Silenced Keys to Literary and Musical Interplays between Lorca and Falla

Between 1920 and 1936, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his friend and folk-­‐music pupil Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, wrote many of their best-­‐known works, all affected by the other artist. The many interconnections between them exceeded the printing space available to the author for his 2014 book on those links. The present article puts those silenced finds into print for the first time. Falla´s 1908 piece “Andaluza” attempts to express the soul of Andalusia by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and folk cadences of that southern Spanish region. The work, together with others by Falla, inspires at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by Lorca: the two “Rider's Songs” from the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs and two short allegorical dialogues of 1925 gathered into Poema del Cante Jondo or Poem of Deep Song . While all these analogies between Falla's music and Lorca´s poetry center around a variety of male Andalusian archetypes, still other likenesses between the two artists show up in Falla´s compositions examining feminine innocence and the two Lorca poems “Two Girls,” two studies on Andalusian woman's purity from Poem of Deep Song.

himself in Act III, scene 1? Three woodmen, like the three fates, foretell the destiny of the two rivals for the love of the Bride. The Moon, also costumed as a woodsman, announces the imminent death of the two men. Death comes onstage as a beggar to prepare the scene of their demise. 4 We have much more to learn and research about how music led Lorca to his finished literary works. Musicologists and composers confirm the relationship of music and literature in Lorca. In the New Yorker, music critic Alex Ross wrote that Lorca "supplies constant cues for music in his writing," and this fact accounts for "part of Lorca's appeal to composers." 5 Musicologist and music historian Carol A. Hess remarked that Lorca´s lyric "exudes musicality in imagery, rhythm, and subject matter." 6 In an entry in Wikipedia last updated on 13 October 2016, a list appears of thirty--nine musical compositions based on Lorca's life or works. 7 The inadequacy of most research on Lorca's music--literature connection stems from the unwillingness of Hispanists to learn the subtle language of musical scores. Lorca knew that language, learned from his mother. In a well--known 1914 photograph, he teaches his younger sister Isabel to read music. Reading scores once read by Lorca discloses countless insights into his art. (Fig. 1). My 2014 book Lorca in Tune with Falla everywhere admits that I could not completely cover my theme of music as a key to Lorca's art. Nor could I achieve that goal by limiting my considerations only to the interrelationships between Lorca´s work and the art of his friend and folk--music teacher Manuel de Falla. 9 They provided an ideal laboratory situation for a link between letters and music: in 1920 the most famous Spanish composer moved to the same city, Granada, where there resided the youth who was to become the most famous Spanish poet. They befriended each other in 1920. Lorca´s family swept up Falla and his sister into their daily lives. From 1920 until Lorca´s assassination in 1936, both artists wrote many of their best--known works, all affected by the other artist. 10 On researching the Falla--Lorca connection in May 2011, I sought clues at the rich collection of the Manuel de Falla Archive in Granada, but also at the impoverished collection of the Federico García Lorca Foundation in Madrid, decimated by the Civil War. Early realizing that the superabundant connections exceeded the time I had to write on them, I had to select the most eminent works by each for my musical and literary comparisons. The selection process eliminated a number of works. Even worse, my Humanities Editor at the University of Toronto Press, Richard Ratzlaff, while supportive in many ways, restricted my research to 300 printed pages as I was completing my typescript. I had to amputate whole chapters. Prof. Walter Aaron Clark, on inviting me to give the first Angelita Romero Distinguished Lecture on Spanish Music and Culture on October 7, 2016, encouraged me to expose these silenced finds for the first time at the University of California, Riverside. The following pages break those silences.
Plunging now into the treasure chest of unpublished Lorca--Falla comparisons, we discover a jewel of a piece by Falla titled, "Andaluza," which I hypothesize affected a number of Lorca poems. The most memorable piece in a collection titled Four Spanish Pieces dating back to the spring of 1908, it was published in Paris in 1909. 11 In program notes, Falla revealed that he had sought to "express the soul of each of the regions indicated in the titles of this work" ("Aragonese, "Cuban," "Rural Santanderine," and "Andalusian") by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and cadences of the folk airs of each. 12 In my book, I tried to show that what Falla had done with regional melodies, Lorca attempted in three of his best known books of poetry, Poem of Deep Song (1931), Gypsy Ballads (1928, and Lament for the Death of the Bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935). In the most reedited of the three, Gypsy Ballads, following Falla's example in Four Spanish Pieces, except using plastic imagery, Lorca identified religious sculptures with the souls of three Andalusian cities, Granada, Cordoba, and Seville. 13 9 Nelson R. Orringer, Lorca in Tune with Falla: Literary and Musical Interludes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 33, 199. 10 Ibid., xi. 11 Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain , 1898--1936 Falla y D. Joaquín Turina (Madrid, 15 January 1915), 5. 13 Orringer, Lorca in Tune with Falla,151. However, if I had had more book space, I would have pointed out an earlier use to which Lorca had put Falla's piece "Andaluza." The work inspired Falla´s most mature and synthetic Andalusian-style composition, the piano solo Fantasía Baetica or "Andalusian Fantasy" (1919). 14 Moreover, it generated at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by García Lorca: the two "Rider´s Songs" gathered, along with other poems, under the title "Andaluzas" in the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs; and the two short dialogues dated 1925 and placed by Lorca at the end of his book of verse Poem of Deep Song (1931). Lorca had suffered the opposite problem with his editor from the one I had had with mine: the editor of Poem of Deep Song found the manuscript too short, and therefore asked the poet to add pages. 15 Hence, Lorca supplied two of the various dialogues in prose he had written independently. One was the "Scene of the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard," a semi--humorous, semi--grotesque imitation of Falla´s idealization of the deep song guitarist. The other was "Dialogue of the Bitter One," based on Lorca's favorite theme of a night horseback ride as a symbol of foreordained death. Since Lorca associated this theme with Andalusia, he must have felt that he was characterizing the soul or ethos of his native region by linking it with such fatalism. In his 1922 lecture "Deep Song. Primitive Andalusian Song," heavily influenced by Falla, Lorca wrote, "Deep song always sings in the night. It has neither morning nor evening nor mountains nor plains. It has nothing but night." 16 Andalusia especially feels the enigma of death. At the base of deep song lies the question with no answer. "Our people holds its arms in the form of the cross while looking at the stars and it will wait for the sign of salvation in vain." Death, concludes Lorca, is "the question of all questions." 17 Let us now examine Falla´s music, patterned after deep song conventions suggesting to Lorca the nocturnal enigma of death. The beginning theme has four strident chords, imitating strong guitar strumming, yet also the metallic fatalism of funeral bells. The clangor, repeated periodically throughout the piece, resounds thanks to the aid of double appoggiaturas or grace notes typifying Spanish dancing. 18 Between the clangs come running notes using hemiola, in a one--and--two--and three--and--rhythm common in Andalusian folksong like bulerías or swift flamenco. The faster notes sound like galloping hoofbeats. The tempo indications allow a characterization of most of the entire piece as wild, swift, and typically Andalusian ["Vivo (très rhythmé et avec un sentiment sauvage)."] 19 Over a third of the way through the piece, there sounds a lyrical theme, with the tempo markings "twice as slow but always agitated, singing very expressively and the melody always stressed" ["Doppio più lento ma sempre mosso. Bien chantant très expressif et la mélodie tonjours bien en dehors"]. 20 The two themes often alternate, the gallop and the cantabile or singing part, up to the 14 Ibid.,58. 15 Federico García Lorca, Poema del cante jondo, ed. Christian de Paepe (Madrid: Espasa--Calpe, 1986), 135.
In parallel fashion, Lorca´s two "Rider´s Songs" from the anthology Songs or Canciones (1924) resemble one another in their mystery: both take place at night, both through their titles link their verses to folk music, both show concern with death which Lorca associates with the Andalusian people, both incorporate, like Falla, rhythms associated with galloping horses, and both appear included in a section of poems with a title resembling Falla's: "Andaluzas." However, in the "Rider´s Song (1860)" [Canción de jinete (1860)], we perceive a flight from sentimentality and softness, and in the other, more famous "Rider´s Song" centered on Cordoba, we discern both the fatalistic horseback motif and an increase of lyric emotion a third of the way through.
Just as Gilbert Chase perceives omission of sentimentality through the assertion of a savage sentiment in Falla´s song, so in Lorca´s "Rider´s Song (1860)," many poetic techniques avoid subjectivity in the experience of death. The use of literary clues without apparent meaning invites the reader to co--author the text. The date 1860, for instance, strikes me as arbitrary. The classical age of Spanish banditry had come previously: bandits like Francisco Esteban el Guapo (1654--1705) and Diego Corrientes (1757--1781), both mentioned in Lorca´s play The Shoemaker´s Prodigious Wife, 26 were remote legend for blind singer/composers of crime ballads in the later nineteenth century. 1860 could denote the initiation of classical flamenco. Yet I think that Lorca left it up to the reader to determine what 1860 means, as well as to devise a narrative making sense of the hapless bandit's death. The blackness of the setting, the enigmatic "black moon," 27 points to a "Black Spain" of savage lawlessness. Only the spurs sing of our rider´s catastrophe (l. 3), and the reader must decipher that 21 Ibid.,25 (mm. 120,127). 22 Ibid. (mm. 129--36). metallic song. The poetic voice twice addresses a question to the dead man's horse about its destination, and twice receives no answer (ll. 5, 15). 28 Matching the hardness of Falla's musical twanging, the hardness of the spurs affirms the savagery of the situation. The savage character of the bandit´s misfortune reaches epic proportions at the center of the poem. Here Lorca echoes an equally enigmatic poet, Chilean creationist Vicente Huidobro, who has written in French the following multiple metaphor: "The wounds of aviators bleed in all the stars" ["Les blessures des aviateurs saignent dans tous les étoiles": Hallali. Poème de guerre, in Obra 603]. 29 Lorca´s speaker adapts Huidobro's hyperbole to the local catastrophe: instead of the stars, the black moon receives the bleeding; instead of aviators, the ribcage of Sierra Morena itself, the savage setting of banditry, sheds the blood in an objectification of human sentiment. 30 Hyperbole becomes astronomic in the metaphor of night applying spurs to its own black shanks, as if it were a masochistic centaur ["The night spurs on/ its black shanks/ nailing on stars"]. 31 The discontinuous narrative reaches what might be an emotional climax----if we knew its exact meaning----. In the penultimate strophe, finite verbs disappear. A scream suddenly sounds. A bonfire acquires a long horn, synthesizing sharp pain and bright color. 32 Finally, let us add a word about form: tercets of narrative hexameters alternate with two line apostrophes to the horse in a braiding effect common to Spanish folk music and visible in Falla´s piece "Andaluza," with its alternation of the savage theme and the cantabile one. The tercets could well derive their ternary rhythm from the hemiolas of Falla´s piece. Falla's hemiolas alternate with four successive clangs. Lorca's speaker inserts instead expressive addresses to the horse. The twice repeated metaphor of blood as the perfumed flower of the knife has a Baudelairian flavor, discovering beauty in the most savage venues, 33 appropriate to Falla´s initial tempo marking.
Let us examine the better--known "Rider Song" using the Andalusian city Cordoba as symbol of the goal unattained due to the intervention of death. Just as Falla´s "Andaluza" creates a rhythmic metaphor of the soul of Andalusia, so Lorca´s repetition of Cordoba five times, once in every strophe, underscores the Andalusian essence of the poetry. In his lecture on "Deep Song. Primitive Andalusian Song," Lorca remarks that the Andalusian people sense the mysteriousness of death, with their arms in the form of a cross about the question of all questions. 34 This "Rider´s Song" has mysterious music accounting for its fame. Like modernist poets Rubén Darío and Juan Ramón Jiménez, 35  The lock--step of the tetrasyllabic accent breaks down in the fearful verse on death peering at the first--person speaker from Cordoban towers. Trisyllable--accented verses take over. From this point on, about halfway through, the poem erupts into a series of "Ay"'s like Falla´s folksong adaptations mimicking deep song "Ay"'s. 37 Objectivity about the rider´s surroundings dissolves into exclamations on the lengthiness of the road, the courage of the pony, and finally the inexorability of death before the road's end . 38 Falla´s song "Andaluza" also ends in a series of musical sighs, which Chase leaves unnoticed. At the end of the music appear tempo markings, "faraway" [lointain] 39 : Score, m. 120, p. 25) and "mysterious" [misterioso] 40 , and the mysterious refrain "Cordoba/ faraway and alone" echoes once more, like Falla's initial theme, though read more distantly and more mysteriously at the end of Lorca´s poem like a rubato. 41 Let us now examine the two brief dialogues appended as an afterthought to Poem of Deep Song at the request of the first editor. Lorca lengthened the book with these dialogues written in 1925, each followed by its own final ballad or "song" (canción). Like the previous parts of Poem of Deep Song, the two dialogues here examined owe much to Falla. The gypsy in the "Scene of the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard" has traits of deep song described by Falla  1922, Deep Song (Primitive Andalusian Song). According to Falla, deep song with its oral range imitates nature. 42 Likewise, Lorca presents his gypsy as the embodiment of a natural man. Falla views the deep song performer as an instrument of the Andalusian cultural soul. 43 Lorca's gypsy identifies himself with his people and at the same time with no one individual in particular. As a result of his naturalness and identification with the folk, for Falla the guitarist of deep song has no rival in all Europe. 44 Therefore, such a musician would feel inspired in Lorca's special acceptance of the word, as defined in his lecture "Imagination, inspiration, evasion." (1928). Humbled, he would perceive the "irresistible beauty of all things" resting on his shoulders: "There are no longer limits. There are no longer explained laws." Inspiration obeys the laws of what Lorca calls a "poetic logic. "46 To summarize, a gypsy as conceived by Falla and Lorca would be natural, ethnocentric, universal, and inspirational.
Moreover, such a gypsy intuits that nature, in the words of music philosopher Juan David García Bacca, is a "state of fusion and confusion of all in all things. At the same time, fusion and confusion define what is natural." The most beautiful universe seen by natural eyes is only "a fistful of cosmic dust, of elementary plasma, of pre--biotic molecules, of nebulas." 47 Therefore, in the natural state, Lorca´s gypsy recognizes himself as "eso," that, anything at all. 48 Invert this outlook, and there emerges an individual or a community that is unnatural, artificial, egocentric, provincial, and subservient to conventional laws, not to those of natural beauty.
The anti--poetic society that Lorca satirizes in 1925 is the military dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, with Civil Guards or rural police tyrannizing the Andalusian countryside in the mid--1920s and victimizing gypsies. 49 Who better to embody that tyrannical society than Lorca´s Lieutenant Coronel of the Civil Guards? To caricature this villain, Lorca merely turns Falla´s notion of deep song on its head. Lorca could have derived this tactic of inversion from Falla´s ballet The Three--Cornered Hat. Here the Madrid--born villain, the Corregidor, dances a minuet played by harp with eighteenth-century Mozartian or Scarlattian bridge passages, as opposed to the more natural--sounding folk melodies associated with the hero and heroine, the Miller and his Wife. 50 We have a musical opposition between artificial society and genuine nature. Like Falla´s Corregidor, Lorca's anti--hero regards himself as guardian of the established order. Like Falla´s Corregidor, Lorca's finds himself unequal to the task. Lorca's Lieutenant Colonel identifies himself completely with the social order 42 Falla,147. and with his position in it as ranking officer of the Civil Guard. To mock his authority, the playwright supplies a subordinate officer, a Sergeant, to assent mechanically and monosyllabically ("sí," "no") to all he says. 51 To express the power of the Sergeant's rival, a gypsy, Lorca uses a device often employed by Falla: a disembodied singing voice heard from offstage. This practice establishes foreshadowing of possible loss of honor in Falla´s humorous ballet The Three--Cornered Hat. 52 Lorca sets up an ambiance of farcical foreboding. His gypsy sings offstage a nonsense ballad about the daughters of an authority figure in a moment of weakness. A cock crows in the moon, sings the gypsy to the mayor of the town, and his daughters are staring at that maleficent heavenly body (a cause of lunacy, according to popular superstition) (Lorca,Poema del Cante Jondo 266). When the Lieutenant Colonel inquires about the tumult, disturbing the established order, the subservient Sergeant exclaims with horror, "A gypsy!" (¡Un gitano!). 53 The looks of the two adversaries clash. Lorca's gypsy, a child of nature as hinted by Falla in his pamphlet on deep song, has the savage look of an untamed young mule. The beady eyes of the Lieutenant Colonel-Lorca´s anti--hero----cannot withstand his gaze. Comic through the rigidity of repetition, he once more asserts his identity as Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard before demanding to know the gypsy's identity.
A name serves in society as an identity card, allowing control over its bearers by highly placed officials in that society. However, instead of taking his place within the established social order, which dominates by regimenting individuals organized in official ranks, the gypsy dodges any socialized individualization. He identifies himself with his primitive people, something alien to the Civil Guard. He is simply "a gypsy," the Other. Asked by the Lieutenant Colonel to define gypsy, he responds with the non--committal "anything at all" (cualquier cosa) as if he were too elemental-too "natural" in García Bacca´s sense----to deserve pinning down. 55 In the subtle struggle to dominate him by confining him to a single geographic point, the Lieutenant Colonel asks him for his previous whereabouts. Yet the gypsy displays universality like nature itself. He responds that he has been on the bridge that crosses all rivers of the world. 56 He thereby offers a key to the originary, atavistic experience his life allows. The rivers may well symbolize the essences of all poetic experience. Hence, when asked what he was doing by those rivers, he responds by exercising his imagination in ways defying the laws ruling the Lieutenant Colonel's world: this gypsy has built towers of cinnamon, invented wings with which to fly, flown with and without them, and absurdly acquired orange--blossoms in the cold of January and oranges in the snow. 57 Like Falla's gypsies, who surrender themselves to the Andalusian collective spirit, this gypsy receives poetic objects as a legacy, "clouds and rings in my blood." Such defiance of the laws 51 García Lorca, Poema del cante jondo, 264, 265, 267. of the factual world defining the Lieutenant Colonel's narrow parameters automatically causes the can be purged, according to Falla [El «Cante jondo» (Canto primitivo andaluz) 146, n. 1], 69 through the musical rite of deep song. To persuade Amargo to take up the knife, the Rider argues that purchasers have bought 2,000 knives for the cathedral of Malaga to adorn the altars. 78 We recall that the Virgin of Sorrows is iconically represented as bearing seven swords in her heart, as she was sketched by Manuel Ángeles Ortiz on the cover of Falla´s pamphlet about deep song. 79 (Fig. 2). Lorca´s Rider hints that the swords in the cathedral may serve as votive offerings (as pain does in deep song). Amargo, fascinated by death, marvels at the beauty of knives, 80 and his fascination has deep roots. In his 1922 lecture on deep song, Lorca marvels at the accuracy of the adjective jondo, deep: he finds deep song "deeper than all the seas," because it approaches the infinite. 81 Like Falla, he traces it to "distant human stocks"; atavistic, he goes further than Falla: "It comes from the first lament and the first kiss." Similar insights dawn upon Amargo as he contemplates the Rider's knife. He savors the night, proper time for deep song and thick as "a century--old wine." 84 Night is the primordial time, the occasion for the original love, death, and return to un--birth.
In fact, the Rider regards nocturnal suffering as Amargo's existential goal. When Amargo states that he and the Rider have lost their way, the Rider wonders what he can mean. The Rider points to the lights of Granada that both are approaching. Yet, far from rejoicing, for he is never goal-oriented, Amargo expresses despair with a deep singer´s scream----"¡Ay yayayay!" 85 ----often employed in musical compositions by Falla. 86 The Rider explains that Amargo despairs about reaching well--lit Granada, because he feels so comfortable lamenting in the dark. 87 When the Rider points out the brilliance of the city lights, Amargo feels out of his element . Recognizing he is weary, he mounts the Rider's horse and accepts his fatal golden knife. Amargo cannot help but repeat the deep singer´s scream, and the reader understands that the knife aims for his heart. The mountains fill up with hemlock (suicidal potion of Socrates) and with nettles, that inflict pain. 88 Having examined analogies between Falla's music and essays with two poems and two dialogue of Lorca's, all centering around male figures, I must recognize the significance of the feminine presence in Lorca´s art. Women dominate the theatre of Lorca, and critics recognize their central rôles in the operas of Falla, the published and the unpublished. Falla insisted on the innocence of his heroines to a fault. Music critics contrast the uninhibited deportment of Bizet´s Carmen with the innocence of Falla´s Salud in his early opera The Short Life. 89 In the ballet The Three Cornered Hat, Falla regarded the Miller´s Wife Frasquita as so virtuous, that despite her feigned flirtation with the Corregidor, the composer and his librettist eliminated the bishop´s admonitions to her at the end of Alarcón´s homonymous novel to behave with greater modesty. 90 She and her husband Lucas display such innocence, that they live in harmony with nature. "Frasquita´s responsiveness to the natural world" shows when she teaches her "pet blackbird to tell time." 91 Falla´s librettist María Lejárraga recalls that her proposed libretto to the opera Will--of--the--Wisp, where two women compete for the love of one man, offended the composer´s sense of chivalry. Her contention that competition between two "saints" would bore the audience did not move him, and the opera remained 84 GarcíaLorca, Poema del cante jondo, 289. 85 Ibid. 86 Orringer, Lorca in Tune with Falla,69. 87 Lorca, Poema del cante jondo, 290. 88 Ibid., 293. 89 Hess, Sacred Passions, 59. 90 P. A. de Alarcón, El sombrero de tres picos, 18th.ed. Madrid: Rivadaneyra, 1914),155 (edition annotated by Falla); Falla and Martínez--Sierra, El sombrero de tres picos, 76--87 (Act II, finale). 91 Hess, Sacred Passions, 105. incomplete, contributing to Falla´s break with María and her famous producer husband Gregorio Martínez Sierra. 92 Lorca´s friendship with Falla may have motivated him to write "Two Girls," [Dos muchachas], included in Poema del cante jondo and definible as two studies in feminine innocence. Folk song affords enjoyment through contemplation of natural innocence. Such fruition can be derived from the villancico, the traditional Christmas carol. Encouraged by his teacher Felipe Pedrell to study folksong emerging directly from the lips of the people, Falla compiled in 1903 his "only extant collection of folksongs," Cantares de Nochebuena [Songs of Christmas Eve]. 93 Lorca too gathered folksongs, often in company of Falla himself. 94 Many variants exist in the Spanish--speaking world of the villancico "The Virgin Washes Swaddling Clothes," not present in Falla´s collection, and it would not be implausible that Lorca knew more than one. Yet the version he must have had in mind while writing "Dos muchachas" contains the following lyrics: "The Virgin washes swaddling clothes / And stretches them over the rosemary, / The little birds were singing / and the water flowed away laughing." (La Virgen lava pañales / y los tiende en el romero, / los pajaritos cantaban / y el agua se iba riendo). 95 The act of washing and the immaculate character of the washer have a cathartic function, helping listeners to return, transported by remote memories, to primordial experience. In Lorca's secularization of the villancico, he uses the figure of "la Lola," a singer of saetas or Easter deep songs who attracted young men ("toreritos") to her in Seville during Holy Week, and whom the poetic voice previously mocked for her vanity. 96 Here it transforms her into a piece of nature as she washes cotton diapers in the channel. C. B. Morris in his study of Andalusian folk art in Lorca recognizes that his average reader would at once associate her with the Virgin of the famed villancico. 97 She may arouse the desire of the lyric subject, yet remains part of the fertile land, innocent as nature itself. Hence she embodies an Andalusia both complex and even contradictory, as Falla himself has seen. "Under the orange--tree she washes / Cotton diapers. / She has eyes of green / And voice of violet." 98 With eyes as green as the orange--tree leaves, with voice as timid as the violet, Lola belongs to Andalusian nature. Her identification with the Virgin in the villancico comes clear with the references to the water that flows "full of sun"-as if joyful-and to the sparrow singing in the olive grove. 99 Further, a refrain sounds three times, picturing the sensuously blossoming orange tree, with its flowers used for bridal crowns: "Oh, love/ under the orange--tree in bloom." 100 When her work is complete, the soap all spent, Lola trusts that her young men ("torerillos") will all come flocking to her. 101 In Poem of Deep Song, a book of poetry full of contrasts, the second poem of "Two Girls," titled "Amparo," sketches a different form of innocence. The laundress Lola lives outdoors, immersed in nature; Amparo, indoors, partaking of a more inward naturalness. Society imposes chastity on the lonely embroiderer, who recalls in her solitude the deep song genre called the soleá, or loneliness in Andalusian dialect. The poem "Amparo" consists of six brief strophes, three containing tercets in vocalic rhyme like Lorca´s poem "The soleá," 102 which derived its trilineal strophes, interrupted by refrains, from Falla´s opera The Short Life. 103 In "Amparo" the three--line units are interrupted by three strophes of varying lengths, one that defines Amparo in a parenthesized couplet as an equator between jasmine and spikenard 104 : timid little yellow clustered flowers and a bold, pink three--foot high plant with bell--shaped flowers. A piece of nature, like Lola, she combines modesty with aggressiveness.
Another two strophes each contain four lines, pointing to the weakness and mortality of Amparo. The poetic subject addresses that character with an intimate tone in these terms: "You hear the wondrous/ fountains in your patio," 105 a lapping sound of water frequent in Granada and imitated by Falla in his nocturne, "In the Generalife." 106 In a lecture on the adoptive city of Falla, Lorca has remarked, "Granada culminates in its orchestra of fountains full of Andalusian pain and in the vihuela player Narváez and in Falla and Debussy." 107 Unsettling birdsongs also reach Amparo´s ear. In three octosyllables and a broken foot she hears "the weak yellow trill/ of the canary" as if she were an upper--class Salud, who in the first act of Falla´s opera The Short Life almost dies then and there like a female bird awaiting her mate in vain. 108 Amparo experiences her enclosure like a caged canary.
In addition, she sees the trembling of cypresses full of birds, trees associated with the cemetery. Time flees away. All these rich impressions of nature that color Amparo´s character with deft brushstrokes, come between repeated three--line exclamations, "Amparo,/ How alone you are in your house/ While dressed in white!" 109 The poem concludes with a three--line strophe, inserted after the refrain like an afterthought. The speaker, mischievously played by the poetic voice, is accustomed to putting off declarations of love and therefore he clarifies the cause of Amparo´s solitude: "Amparo,/ And how hard it is to tell you,/ 'I love you'!" 110 Lorca´s biographer José Mora Guarnido reveals that during the poet´s visits with him in Pinos Puente, a town close to Fuente Vaquera, where Lorca resided, the two friends used to walk near the home of Amparo Medina. They found her always seated at her window, well--dressed and waiting for her indecisive, selfish lover, who postponed the wedding year after year. 111 Modest but passionate, Amparo is a woman as natural as Lola. In their attitudes towards life, they resemble the sisters Mary and Martha of Luke 10, 38--42. Lola enjoys an active wait, singing and washing, while Amparo suffers a contemplative waiting, attempting in vain to suspend time while embroidering slowly like Lorca´s dramatic heroine Mariana Pineda. Both women await desired men, although Lola expects many and Amparo only one (who never comes). Lola earns her destiny with her labors, while Amparo writes hers over the embroidery canvas. The presence of two contrasting women as Andalusian archetypes bears witness to the contradictory variety of the region. In the foregoing pages, we have examined a wide, contradictory panoply of Andalusian archetypes, inspired by Falla's music and musical writing in Lorca's poetry and poetic dialogue. Besides the horse and rider toward death, the horsewhipped gypsy, the innocent washerwoman, and the upper--class unmarried woman, we could point out many more unpublished but illuminating analogies between Falla's music and Lorca's letters. Let the Hispanists and musicologists among my readers collaborate with me and with each other in the delightful but endless task of spotting these analogies.