O "cante jondo", segundo o poeta, é o canto mais profundo, um canto escuro e misterioso onde a magia do "duende" se manifesta em um momento imóvel e único. A relação entre o poeta de Granada e o "cante jondo" é profunda e importantíssima para a valorização da arte andaluza e inclusive para a compreensão da obra de Lorca. As a result her songs are intensely dramatic and are exciting pieces to perform.įilho da Andaluzia como o "cante jondo" e seu "duende", Federico García Lorca, um apaixonado por tal arte, foi um dos poetas espanhóis mais representativos do século XX. She felt the humanity in Lorca's poetic cries and expressed them through her own language. Being of Spanish heritage, but not Andalusian, she is less committed to the local musical constraints.
Fabregas, like Lorca, has taken a folk medium and expanded it beyond its original boundaries. His life was short, but his legacy is long. The poet communicated on several levels, one as a voice of Andalusia, Spain and ultimately mankind and another with his own private message. They echoed the history, the landscape and the tears, but they did so through symbolism and vivid imagery. Lorca's writings were not imitations of the traditional cante jondo. He saw folk music as the core of the national musical and literary identity in Germany, France and Russia and worked to establish Spain as an artistic equal. His goal was to preserve the essence of the song and lift it to an artistic plain. Lorca felt the validity of "deep song" and he was disturbed that it was being corrupted by commercialism and was afraid it would be lost to posterity. This study explores the history and the poetic and musical forms Andalusian cante jondo as the inspiration for the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca set by Elisenda Fabregas in the song cycle, Five Poems of Garcia Lorca (1992). The original folk idiom is a medium less concerned with beauty than the cathartic release of pain of every day life. "Deep song," the translation for cante jondo, is the forerunner of the flamenco, but it is a communication of a dark soul rather than an exuberant entertainment. The genre expresses the history of the region, reveals the typography of the landscape and cries the tears of its people. The traditional cante jondo is a song unique to Andalusia as it developed from the "mosaic" of cultures that have inhabited its borders, including Arabs, Jews and Gypsies. This paper aims to examine some of the key aspects of the relation between the sadness of the Andalusian song and Spanish poetry in the first third of the 20th century. This trend continued in the next decade, when Cansinos Assens and the Caba brothers placed similar emphasis on tragic Andalusia, based on an analysis of the «cante jondo» in which metaphysical, social and historical aspects were mixed. In opposition to the cheerful, colourful and folkloric Andalusia described by poets like Reina and Rueda, there are other Modernist authors like Villaespesa, Sánchez Rodríguez, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Darío who refined the literary image of Andalusia from the distinctive notes of sadness or grief, thus initiating a thematic chain which from the twenties extended Lorca’s image of «Andalucía del llanto» under Neopopularism and the Vanguard movement. Only part of the analysis of Poema del cante jondo is published here, but after the in-depth examination of the volume it can be stated that despite the disputability of his theory, the poet could recreate the emotions and thoughtfulness of “deep song”.įrom the so-called «fin de siglo» to the thirties some of the Spanish poets relied on the folk song –and more specifically on the «cante jondo» or flamenco– to define an alleged Andalusian soul.
Considering the place of origin of cante jondo Lorca did not state his opinion, therefore, based on some references, I try to clarify if he shared his teacher’s, Manuel de Falla’s opinion, which is different from what experts claim today. The origin of the genre is even more problematic, and, in the absence of written documents, the debate between the representatives of the Andalusian and the gypsy origin is still unclosed. The first disputed aspect is stylistic categorisation – while the poet makes a distinction between cante jondo and cante flamenco, flamencologists consider cante jondo as a subtype of flamenco. The differences between Lorca’s and later experts’ results are presented from the perspective of modern flamencology. In this extract, I discuss the theory of cante jondo. The aim is to present an objective image of García Lorca, the musician, disregarding his reputation as poet and dramatist. The topic of my essay is the musical work of Federico García Lorca and the effect of music on poetry.