22 / 56
All the same, though, the disparity between the early works and the
Fantasía bætica
is obvious. How do you see the irruption of the
Cuatro
piezas españolas
in this corpus?
It’s often said that these four pieces were inspired by Albéniz, but the economy
of resources, the care he takes to create a precise language in which everything
superfluous has already been removed, is Falla’s hallmark. It makesme think of
Pour
le Tombeau de Paul Dukas
, where he writes with the same feeling for the essential.
Even though the
Cuatro piezas
are early works, even though you can find traces of
the influence of Albéniz or Debussy, Falla already affirms one of the axioms of his
art in them: to say the maximum with the minimum of resources. The dryness of
the pianistic idiom, its renunciation of ornament for ornament’s sake, puts this
keyboard writing very much in a category of its own, and it’s a language that has to
be mastered. I long delayed the moment of finally placing the
Fantasía bætica
onmy
piano desk, and when I read it through I realised that I was going to have to wrestle
with a unique language that is Falla’s alone; it would be fair to say that the pianism
of the
Fantasía bætica
is virtually without points of reference.
22 MANUEL DE FALLA