CHAN 20276 – MOMPOU

Mompou: Works for Solo Piano

Introduction

In a 1952 lecture, Frederic (Federico) Mompou (1893 – 1987) spoke about his lifelong quest for ‘a simple line, the perfect form’ and he went on to identify the importance of Erik Satie

whose real triumph was that his music represented a return to the search for basic emotions and forms, placing itself in the current of a great river which led us back to its source.

His own aim as a composer was

to bring us closer to a new warmth in life, and the expression of the human heart, forever the same and forever new.

His music is often strikingly beautiful, stylistically rather timeless, frequently including elements of incantation and magic, and rooted in Catalan culture and religion. During his student years in Paris (where he originally intended to become a concert pianist), Mompou encountered the latest music of Debussy, Ravel, and Satie. What emerged in his own early compositions was distinctive, even though the influence of his great French predecessors is clearly evident.

Jeunes filles au jardin

‘Jeunes filles au jardin’ is one of the Scènes d’enfants, composed in 1915 – 18 (and published in Paris by Maurice Senart, in 1921). The tone is tender and nostalgic, the piano writing wonderfully idiomatic – with bell-like sounds, luminous, richly voiced chords, and delicately coloured fragments of melody. There is no specific programme, but the piece opens with capricious alternating phrases marked Calme and Vif before introducing a languid melody, supported by exquisite harmonies. The central section, marked Lentement, comes with a poetic instruction to the player: Chantez avec la fraîcheur de l’herbe humide (Sing with the coolness of wet grass), as gently dancing rhythms emerge, before the music returns to the opening material. In this tiny piece, Mompou manages to encapsulate both the innocence of childhood and his own nostalgic recollections of it, bathing these memories in diaphanous piano sonorities. It was after hearing a performance of the complete Scènes d’enfants, in 1921, that the critic Émile Vuillermoz declared Mompou to be ‘the only disciple and successor of Debussy’, and Paris certainly took him to its collective heart: his works were played in Parisian concert halls throughout the inter-war years – even during the 1930s, a decade in which he composed almost nothing. But these performances never featured Mompou himself at the piano: though he was a very fine player, his acute stage fright made playing in public impossible. He was happier in the more intimate environment of private salons (or, indeed, the recording studio: in 1974, Mompou recorded five LPs of his piano music for the Spanish firm Ensayo and these were subsequently reissued on CD).

Cançons i danses

In 1921, Mompou composed the first of his piano works entitled Cançons i danses (Songs and Dances). Over the next four decades, up to 1962, he would produce twelve such pieces (three more – for guitar, piano, and organ – would follow in the 1970s). The design for each is broadly similar: a slow ‘cançó’ (song) followed by a more animated ‘dansa’ (dance), but the pattern sometimes varies, and these pieces are anything but formulaic. Mompou intended to provide ‘a contrast between lyricism and rhythm, to avoid one collection of songs and another of dances’, while also exploring

a form adopted by many composers... Liszt’s Rhapsodies and, among modern composers, Bartók or the Tonadas (Chilean Melodies) by Pedro Humberto Allende.

His reference to Allende’s Tonadas de carácter popular chileno is apposite: first published in Santiago, in 1920 (and later in France), these twelve pieces are dedicated to the great Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes (friend and advocate of Debussy, Ravel, Granados, and Albéniz, among many others). They follow a slow-fast pattern, similar to Mompou’s design, but while Allende carefully planned his twelve Tonadas as a set (each one in a different key), the pieces by Mompou emerged in a more haphazard way.

The first of the set is a reminder of his love of Chopin, particularly the mazurkas, and also his life-long fondness for drones and hieratic, chime-like sounds – a stylistic fingerprint that Mompou himself traced back to his discovery of mediaeval organum. At the same time, the Catalan origins of the melodies are always apparent (the song draws on ‘La filla del Carmesí’, and the dance on ‘Bal de castellterçol’). The second of the Cançons i danses was started in 1918 but only finished in 1924. The song introduces the Catalan melody ‘Senyora Isabel’, underpinning it with sonorous bass notes which suggest the tolling of a deep bell. The dance is also based on an almost unchanging drone, its melody simple and captivating. The cançó of No. III (1926) opens with a tune which is similar to ‘Jeunes filles au jardin’, but is in fact a Catalan Christmas carol about the Virgin Mary. The melody of the dance is Mompou’s own, but the form is a sardana – the Catalan national dance – heard over a leaping ostinato, before the rhythms slow and the music dissolves into quietness.

The melody for the song of No. IV (1928) was described by Wilfrid Mellers as ‘among the most beautiful in the series’ and is based on the traditional song ‘A la vora de la mar’, also known as ‘El Mariner’ (The Sailor). Wreathed in increasingly mysterious harmonies, it gives way to a vigorous dance (with a contrasting section which Mompou calls ‘Promenade’), occasionally spiced by acidic harmonies, until a haunting reprise of the opening song, marked ‘En souvenir’. The tempo marking for the song of No. V (1942) is Lento liturgico, and here the people are represented not by secular folksongs but by a melody (in F sharp minor) which recalls their religious faith, its contours suggestive of plainchant. The dance is a complete contrast, in sunny E major, with a more tender central section which Mellers likened to ‘an altar dance in a rustic church’. This was the first of the set that Mompou wrote after his return to Barcelona, following the Nazi occupation of Paris, in June 1941. The remaining pieces were all written in Catalonia. No. VI, also composed in 1942, bears a dedication to Artur Rubinstein. It is rich-toned and melancholy, in the key of E flat minor, its harmonies often highly chromatic. Mompou described the animated dance which follows as ‘Creole, with vigorous and sensuous rhythms’.

The song of No. VII (1944) has been likened to Poulenc, and it certainly has something of the same charm. Incidentally, Poulenc always held Mompou in high regard, and after a two-week visit to Spain in 1949 he wrote to Milhaud that

the artistic climate is really dead, apart from in Barcelona where Mompou and his group are doing great work.

The folk-like dance has a rather formal character, dissolving into something more poetic in its dream-like coda. The song of No. VIII (1946) is a broad, solemn song in G minor which gives way to a short dance, its bright G major harmonies later coloured with some alluring dissonances. No. IX (1948) is dedicated to the Spanish pianist Gonzalo Soriano. Both the song and the dance are based on traditional Catalan tunes and the piece ends with quiet bell-like sounds, the E flat chords deliciously spiced with Lydian A naturals.

No. X (1953) is dedicated to the Infanta Maria Cristina of Bourbon Battenberg (a member of the Spanish royal family, then in exile). Appropriately enough, the music of the song is drawn not from folk music but from the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X (known as ‘il sabio’, ‘the wise’), King of Castile and León in the thirteenth century, and also a poet and composer. The music is slow and formal and the gentle dance has an untroubled amiability. No. XI (1961) is dedicated to the Colombian harpsichordist and pianist Rafael Puyana. The song opens with stern octaves, its melody alluding to liturgical music. The first dance (in D minor, as is the song) is a rather wistful Allegro moderato which gives way to a reprise of the song, to be followed by a new, more stately dance in D major. The last of the set, dedicated to the memory of the poet Léon-Paul Fargue, was composed in 1962. Both sections are based on Catalan melodies: the song on ‘La dama d’Aragó’ (The Lady of Aragon), and the dance on ‘La mala nova’, a strange, rather ambiguous tune which inspires a magical setting from Mompou at his most inventive: as Wilfrid Mellers put it, here ‘Catalonia has become synonymous with Mompou’s private vision’.

Variations sur un thème de Chopin

Mompou’s love of Chopin finds direct expression in the set of variations on the famous Prelude in A major (Op. 28 No. 7). In 1938 the Spanish cellist Gaspar Cassadó suggested to Mompou that he should compose a set of variations on this theme for cello and piano. Nothing came of that plan, but after writing four variations for piano, Mompou expanded the work to its current twelve variations in 1957. This came about after the Royal Ballet, in London, requested a ballet from him, as a successor to The House of Birds (a 1955 ballet which used piano pieces by Mompou orchestrated by John Lanchbery). The Mompou – Chopin ballet was never produced, but the piano variations remain: they explore the theme with great ingenuity, sometimes with humour, and with occasional self-references: Variation X includes a quotation from the Cançó i dansa No. VI as well as an allusion to Chopin’s Fantaisie-impromptu. Variation XII is an entertaining ‘Galop’, and it is followed by a reflective epilogue in which the composer offers his most personal reworking of the melody, now transforming Chopin into the purest Mompou.

Paisajes

The three pieces that make up Paisajes (Landscapes) were composed in 1942, 1947, and 1960. After his return to Barcelona, in 1942 (and after well over a decade of creative silence), Mompou met the Catalan pianist Carmen Bravo who subsequently became his wife. The first two pieces are dedicated to her. The pianist Sir Stephen Hough has described these pieces as ‘among the most visionary and distilled of Mompou’s output’. The first evokes a courtyard in which the nearby cathedral’s bells can be heard, and the second, according to Mompou himself, depicts

the Barcelona park of Montjuic, not very large but peaceful, and, as we can see and even hear, with a frog jumping about.

Antonio Iglesias, the pianist and musicologist to whom Mompou dedicated the third of the Paisajes, recalled that he was out walking with the composer when they heard the distinctive sound made by the axles of wheels on Galician carts. Iglesias described the piece itself as

a compendium of musical subtleties in true Mompou style which fortunately does not give us an exact reproduction of the sound of those far-off carts, but immerses us in a nostalgic yearning for it.