Manuel de Falla

Born: November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain
Died: November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina

The Three-Cornered Hat

• Composed: 1917 and 1919
  
• Premiere: July 22, 1919 in London, conducted by Ernest Ansermet
• CSO Notable Performances: 
  • First: February 1936, Eugene Goossens conducting
  • Most Recent: January 1987, Jesús López Cobos conducting
  • Recording: Falla: The Three-Cornered Hat released in 1987, Jesús López Cobos conducting
• Instrumentation: mezzo-soprano solo, 3 flutes (incl. 2 piccolos), 3 oboes (incl. English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, castanets, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, xylophone, harp, celeste, piano, strings
• Duration: approx. 34 minutes

The dazzling Parisian success of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe that began in 1909 came to a jarring halt when the Guns of August tore across Belgium and France to begin World War I in 1914. Diaghilev, Léonide Massine and some of the company took refuge in Switzerland and Spain, while Nijinsky and others fled to America. Diaghilev arranged a season in Spain for 1917 and, always on the prowl for new talent, took the opportunity to look up a musician Igor Stravinsky had met in Paris in 1910. Stravinsky described his Spanish colleague as “even smaller than myself, and as modest and withdrawn as an oyster...unpityingly religious, and the shyest man I have ever met.” His name was Manuel de Falla.

Falla, a meticulous worker who composed slowly, had completed only a few works by 1917—most notably Nights in the Gardens of Spain, the opera La vida breve and the ballet El amor brujo—and was little known outside of his homeland. When Diaghilev and Massine presented themselves to him in Barcelona, he took them to see a one-act farce set in the early 19th century about the attempted seduction of a miller’s wife by the local governor for which he had provided the music, El corregidor y la molinera (“The Corregidor and the Miller’s Wife”). The script for this “pantomime” was by Gregorio Martínez Sierra, who based it on a short novel by Pedro de Alarcón published in 1874 as El sombrero de tres picos. Alarcón, in turn, was said to have heard the story from an old goatherd who hired himself out as an entertainer for local weddings and feasts. Of Falla’s score, Massine wrote that it “seemed to us very exciting, and its blend of violence and passion was similar to much of the music of the local folk dances. Both Diaghilev and I felt that the story and the music offered us the potential of a full-length ballet.” Falla accepted Diaghilev’s proposal to revise and extend his score for production when the war was over, but he gave the provision that he be allowed enough time to study Spanish folk music and dance styles to assure the correct atmosphere for the finished work. Diaghilev thought this a capital idea, and he, Massine, Falla and Félix Fernandez García, a locally celebrated dancer who was enlisted to instruct the company in Spanish dance styles, set off for a leisurely tour of the country.

The four pilgrims visited Saragossa, Salamanca, Toledo, Seville, Cordova, Granada and many small villages along the way, eyes and ears constantly open for material for the new ballet. Falla and Massine both collected a wealth of ideas, and snippets from several of the melodies that the composer discovered ended up in the score, including one he heard by chance from a blind man walking the streets near the Alhambra chanting tunes to the accompaniment of his battered guitar. Falla took up the ballet score again after his grand Iberian tour, added to it two dance numbers, and expanded the instrumentation from the original 17-piece chamber scoring to full orchestra.

It was not until World War I ended that the production of The Three-Cornered Hat could be staged as part of the 1919 London season of the Ballet Russe. Diaghilev commissioned Pablo Picasso to design the sets and costumes; it was the great painter’s first ballet assignment. Massine choreographed the work with the help of the Spanish dancer Félix García, who was brought to London to train the company for the premiere. (Sadly, the pressures of artistic life in a big city were more than the man could bear, and he lost his reason soon after he arrived, dying in a British asylum in 1941.) The first performance, on July 22, 1919 at London’s Alhambra Theatre and conducted by Ernest Ansermet, was a great success (Spanish dance schools sprang up all around London within weeks), and The Three-Cornered Hat was an important milestone in establishing Falla’s international reputation.

Manuel de Falla’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat concerns a village miller and his pretty wife. The Corregidor (mayor) is attracted to the miller’s wife and makes his advances. She tells her husband to watch as she spurns the old man’s attempts at love. The Corregidor chases her but becomes aware of the teasing intrigue between husband and wife and departs. That evening the village festivities are interrupted by the local constabulary, who have come to arrest the miller on a charge trumped up by the Corregidor to get him out of the way. The Corregidor appears as the miller is led away but falls into the millstream as he is pursuing the girl. She runs off in search of her husband while the Corregidor removes his sodden clothes, including his three-cornered hat (the symbol of his office), hangs them on a chair outside the mill, and jumps into the absent girl’s bed to ward off a chill. Meanwhile, the miller has escaped and returned home. He sees the Corregidor’s discarded clothes and believes himself betrayed by his wife. Vowing to get even, he exchanges his garments for those of the official, scribbles on the wall “The wife of the Corregidor is also very pretty,” and runs off in search of his conquest. The Corregidor emerges to find only the miller’s clothes. He puts them on just in time for the police, hunting their escaped prisoner, to arrest him by mistake. The miller’s wife returns, followed by the miller, and the two are happily reconciled.

Falla’s masterful score captures both the dramatic action of the story and the colorful milieu of its setting. Gilbert Chase said of The Three-Cornered Hat that, like the best of Falla’s music, it is “an unceasing quest for the musical soul of Spain.” There are bits of many traditional Spanish melodies threaded through the score, but it is far more than a mere quodlibet of traditional tunes. Falla penetrated to the heart of the music of his homeland—the fiery cante jondo, the vibrant melodies and rhythms of Andalusia, the flamenco—and distilled them into a style that marks him as “a poet of Spanish emotion,” according to Georges Jean-Aubrey. The Neighbor’s Dance is a seguidillas, The Grapes is a fandango, The Miller’s Dance a farruca, and The Final Dance a jota. Enrique Franco’s summary of Falla’s style applies with special relevance to The Three-Cornered Hat. “Falla was no revolutionary,” Franco wrote, “but what he created was entirely new. His powerful originality depended not on matters of technique—even if in this he made startling innovations—but on substance.... It is as if Falla developed and exhausted all the possibilities of Spanish nationalism.”

 —Dr. Richard E. Rodda