Ex. 4-17: Asturiana

This is the third of Falla's Seven Spanish Folk Songs, written in 1914, when he was 37, at the end of his seven years in Paris. The melody is an old folk song from Asturias, in northern Spain, which Falla took almost unchanged from a published collection and set with a new piano part. In the words, a sad person leans against a green pine tree for comfort, and the pine, seeing them cry, cries too. The vocal line stays within a sixth, the narrowest range of any of Falla's songs.

The set began when a Spanish singer in Paris asked Falla which Spanish songs she should sing in her concerts, and he offered to arrange some for her himself. In June 1914 he wrote to a friend that he had to hurry, because the songs were to be sung within a week, but when he learned the concert was a kind of variety show, he refused to hand them over. When the First World War broke out that summer, Falla returned to Madrid, and he played the piano himself at the first performance there in January 1915. The set is dedicated to a friend in Paris whose home was a gathering place for musicians such as Ravel and Stravinsky; Ravel wrote his piano duets Mother Goose for her two children. Falla himself recorded the set as pianist in 1928 and 1930, with the soprano María Barrientos.

Manuel de Falla was born in Cádiz, in southern Spain, in 1876. From 1902 to 1904 he studied with Felipe Pedrell, who taught that Spanish composers should build their music on their own country's folk songs. In 1907 he moved to Paris, where Paul Dukas introduced him to Albéniz and Debussy, and he became friends with Ravel. Back in Spain he wrote his best-known works, the ballets El amor brujo (Love, the Magician) and The Three-Cornered Hat. He died in Argentina in 1946.

From the album Manuel De Falla - Siete Canciones Populares Españolas by Angelika Wied (2020)
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