Emmanuel Chabrier

• Born: January 18, 1841, Ambert, Puy de Dôme, France
• Died: September 13, 1894, Paris, France

España

• Composed: 1883
  
• Premiere: November 4, 1883 in Paris, conducted by Charles Lamoureux
  
• Duration: approx. 8 minutes

“Every night finds us at the bailos flamencos [sic], surrounded by toreros in lounge suits, black felt hats cleft down the middle, jackets nipped in at the waist and tight trousers revealing sinewy legs and finely modeled thighs. And all around, the Gypsy women singing their malagueñas or dancing the tango, and the manzanilla circulating from hand to hand that everyone is forced to drink. Flashing eyes, flowers in their lovely hair, shawls knotted at the waist, feet tapping out an endless variety of rhythms, arms and hands quivering, undulating bodies in ceaseless motion, dazzling smiles—and all the while cries of ‘Olé! Olé!’” Thus ran an excited report from Emmanuel Chabrier to some Parisian friends concerning his trip to Spain in 1882. The French composer and his wife had arrived in Spain in July, and were making an extensive six-month tour around the country, visiting San Sebastian, Burgos, Toledo, Seville, Granada, Barcelona and most of the famous sights. He loved it and consumed Spanish culture voraciously. “Next Sunday, while with one hand you are watering your garden and with the other blowing kisses to your wives, we shall all be at the bull-ring. I’ve been dreaming about it for a week,” he wrote to his friends and the publishers Enoch and Costallat.

Chabrier transcribed Spain’s indigenous music at every stop, carefully noting down jotas, tangos, habaneras, sevillanas and malagueñas. He told the conductor Charles Lamoureux, director of the Société des Nouveaux Concerts in Paris, that he planned to write a new work on the themes he collected, “... una fantasia extraordinaria, muy española ... my rhythms, my tunes will arouse the whole audience to a fever pitch of excitement; everyone will embrace his neighbor madly.” Chabrier set to work on España as soon as he arrived home in December. He played the original piano version early the next year for Lamoureux, who was so impressed that he encouraged the composer to orchestrate the piece so that it could be programmed at his concerts later that season. España created a sensation when it was premiered in November 1883 — it was Chabrier’s first unqualified success and overnight established him among the leading creative figures of French music. 

“The way in which M. Chabrier has developed these themes of popular origin and inspiration effectively conveys the moods, now lively and impetuous, vociferous and stirring, or again full of languor and voluptuousness, so characteristic of Spanish song,” wrote the critic, scholar and authority on folk music Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray in a review of the first performance. “The composer has invested them with the rich trappings of modern instrumentation, but without in any way depriving them of their primitive color and natural accents.... Before leaving Spain, M. Chabrier was wise to lay in a good provision of sunlight that he must have been pleased on his return to find on his compositional palette.” So gratified was Chabrier with the success of his Iberian-inspired venture that he composed a Habañera for piano in 1885 and orchestrated it three years later as an encore for España. The popularity of España continued: it served as the stimulus and model for such later French compositions as Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole and Debussy’s Ibéria; Emile Waldteufel paraphrased its themes in his España Waltz; and as late as the 1950s the piece was cannibalized by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning to yield the pop tune “Hot Diggity,” which became one of crooner Perry Como’s greatest hits.

Chabrier noted that the chief characteristic of España is the manner in which it juxtaposes and blends the fierce, rough strains of the jota with the sensuous, dreamy undulations of the malagueña, both sections based on songs he collected in Spain. To these motives he added a melody of his own invention (first intoned by the trombones in the work’s middle section). España is among the most exciting, colorful creations in the French symphonic repertory (“the most perfectly orchestrated composition of the last century,” according to English composer and conductor Constant Lambert), yet it also retains the indelible flavor of the country that inspired it, as the Spanish master Manuel de Falla once remarked: “No Spaniard has succeed better than Chabrier in giving us, with such authenticity and genius, the variety of jota shouted by the country folk of Aragon.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda