Alberto Ginastera’s Spanish connection

Legend has it that Alkabul, the Sultan of the Medina of Granada, fell in love with the young Al-Azhar and killed her slave parents in order to marry her. But when Al-Azhar met Xurán, a young Nasrid architect from Granada, and they declared their love between the palms of the Alhambra surrounded by bitter flowering orange trees, the Sultan killed the beautiful Al-Azhar, scattering her ashes among the palace’s rose bushes. It is said that for this reason, when the breeze blows over the gardens of the Alhambra, an intense and unforgettable aroma of orange blossom reaches across Granada.

I was reminded of this a month ago when my orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, performed a concert at the Granada international festival. In the inner courtyard of the palace, another love story was recalled through our performance of the overture to Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila. The Russian composer also became haunted by the scent of orange blossom and views of the Alhambra during the two years he spent living in the Albayzín district.

But the spell wasn’t just cast on musicians; poets, writers, painters and artists have all succumbed to the magic emanating from the Alhambra, the Generalife palace and its surroundings, the Albayzín and the Sacromonte – in particular in the 20th century between the two world wars.

Granada at that time served as a true mythical city, and writers first felt inspired even before the Spanish War of Independence (1808-14). The “exotic” was at the heart of the Romantic sensibility; the Orient was the epitome of the exotic and Granada was seen as the European link to the Orient.

This is possibly what led the composer Manuel de Falla to settle in Granada after his travels to Madrid, Paris and London. He was born in Cádiz, moved to Madrid at the start of the 20th century, where he studied with the composer and musicologist Felipe Pedrell and was introduced to his “Spanish popular songbook”, which inspired him to include themes and rhythms from flamenco and popular Spanish traditional songs in his own works.

Before settling in Granada, Falla spent seven years in Paris, where he developed great friendships with Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. Falla also met many Spanish composers there including Turina, Granados and Albéniz, as well as the Basque painter Zuloaga and notable French musicians, and was immersed in the Russian ballets of Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky’s ground-breaking work. At the start of the first world war, however, Falla had to return to Spain and settled in Granada, which was culturally as close as he could get to Paris. He had portrayed the city in his first major work, the opera La Vida Breve, and later in his Nights in the Gardens of Spain, which recreates the atmosphere of the Generalife’s gardens.

With Falla’s move to Granada, the city became a draw to artists he had met in Paris – Ravel, Casella, Dalí, Milhaud and even the Polish-American pianist Arthur Rubinstein. It was Falla himself who, through a conversation with the conductor Ernest Ansermet, found out that Stravinsky was going through some financial hardship, and he proposed to Rubinstein that he commission the Russian composer to write a work for him, Piano Rag Music. Rubinstein not only accepted, but also commissioned Falla himself to write him a work as an appreciation of this kind gesture, the Fantasía Bética, thus creating one of the most celebrated Spanish works for piano.

But it was once he had settled into the rhythm of life in Granada that Falla really opened up the dialogue with the artists that defined the cultural climate of the city. The key figure was his friend, the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was very active in the famous social gatherings of “El rinconcillo” at the Cafe Alameda, where poets, painters, sculptors, photographers and musicians met. The creation of the literary magazine El Gallo (The Rooster) followed, led by young intellectuals who wanted to shake up the city’s outdated cultural scene, and finally El Ateneo was opened – an arts centre seeking to push the boundaries, where conferences, concerts, exhibitions and film screenings took place.

García Lorca dedicated many of his poems to his city (“Granada is a dream of sounds and colours”). In his own home he staged and directed a Punch and Judy show; Falla was the conductor, and the artist Hermenegildo Lanz designed the set. Lanz later went on to work with Falla in creating the puppets for his work El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show).

In 1922 the famous Cante Jondo contest, an international celebration of Spanish song and flamenco, took place at the Alhambra Palace. It was the brainchild of Falla, with strong support from García Lorca, and Falla invested a huge amount of energy, time and enthusiasm. Cante jondo is a specific form of Andalucían folk singing, originating with the Gypsies, in which the gritty, intense and vibrant sound comes from the very depths of their bodies – from the soul – and all their laments and joys are deeply expressed on stage.

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During the first world war, Diaghilev brought his Ballets Russes to Spain, with performances in Madrid and in the Alhambra. Diaghilev was moved by the Alhambra’s charm and the suggestive power of Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and he asked Falla to adapt it for ballet. Falla turned down this proposal, instead offering what was to become one of his most famous works, El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat), which I most recently conducted with the Berlin Philharmonic. It is a common misconception that this style of Spanish music is light, like Fred Astaire’s dancing – but my challenge is to convey to the orchestra that it is solid and powerful, as you hear with a flamenco dancer’s stamping of the feet.

Falla quotes many popular songs in The Three-Cornered Hat, recreating them with influences including flamenco and cante jondo, and the result is a gem of a work, which reveals an exceptional musical and theatrical talent, and an orchestration that is full of timbres and colours, evoking the flamenco singers and guitarists throughout.

At the BBC Proms three years ago I performed The Three-Cornered Hat with the BBC Philharmonic and the Antonio Márquez flamenco company. I’d like to think that the atmosphere resembled that of its 1919 premiere at the Alhambra theatre in London, with a stellar team behind it: dancers Tamara Karsavina and Léonide Massine from the Ballets Russes, sets and costumes designed by Picasso, and Ansermet on the podium. It is striking that two profoundly different Andalucían talents enjoyed such success together on this project – the extrovert Picasso and the demure, modest and deeply religious Falla.

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With the establishment of the Republic and the subsequent civil war, the charm of Granada lost its power over a divided Spain. It was a difficult time for the humanist Falla, with the assassination of his friend García Lorca and the ongoing barbarity and burning of churches, which caused him to suffer a deep intellectual and physical crisis.

He sought exile in Argentina, where he linked up with many Spanish friends and artists such as Rubinstein, Rudolf Firkušnỳ and Erich Kleiber, and his music brought with him that very scent of orange blossom from Granada. The Three-Cornered Hat and Master Peter’s Puppet Show were received with affection in the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, in a programme that included the ballet Panambí by the Argentinian composer, Alberto Ginastera.

In the year of the centenary of Ginastera’s birth, it is easy to see the great similarity of creative ambition of these two composers, especially in Panambí, which was his first published work but displays enormous influences of Argentinian folklore and that of Stravinsky; it is no surprise that Panambí has been referred to as the “Latin Rite of Spring”. Ginastera’s Ollantay, an orchestral triptych, is another story of impossible love, between the Inca warrior Ollantay and Cusi Coyllur, surrounded by the beauty, scents and magic of the Andes.

Ginastera’s involvement with the Andalucían writers led him to set the poems of García Lorca, among others, to music in his acclaimed String Quartet No 3. Foreseeing the unstable political situation that would lead Argentina to dictatorship, he voluntarily exiled himself to the United States, where he studied with Aaron Copland. There he achieved international recognition for his Violin Concerto (with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein), the Harp Concerto (with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy) and Don Rodrigo (with the New York City Opera), without ever losing his pride in and love for home, and feeling immensely flattered when his compositions were considered “the music of the pampas”. With this centenary, I hope Ginastera will again be considered one of the most important Latin American composers of the 20th century, without doubt influenced by the universal spirit that Falla brought with him to Argentina.

• Juanjo Mena is chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, which plays Ginastera’s Ollantay at the Proms on 2 August. Panambí is on Chandos records.