(Born April 16, 1893, in Barcelona; died there June 30, 1987)
Federico Mompou was one of the great Catalan musicians of the 20th century. His work was influenced by the music of French composers Debussy and Satie and by the nationalist movement of Spanish composers. Mompou's goal for his music was to express a great deal while writing as little as possible; as a result, he created spare, meditative distillations. His work, largely miniaturist, uses small statements to achieve profound expressiveness. Typically, he created popular themes with almost no modulation or development, but his piano miniatures do not lack either originality or charm.
As a student, Mompou heard a concert in 1911 given by the French pianist Marguerite Long in Barcelona; as a result, he was moved to withdraw from the local music school where he had enrolled to become a pianist, and with the help of a recommendation from Enrique Granados, he journeyed to Paris to study composition instead of piano. He returned home in 1913, but from 1921 to 1941, he made his home in Paris, living an almost monkish life, devoting himself to the development of his simple, severe, typically Catalan musical style, so unlike the Andalusian music that the non-Hispanic world thinks typical of music from Spain. The French made Mompou a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres while the Spanish elected him a member of the Royal Academy of San Jorge in Barcelona and of San Fernando in Madrid.
Mompou's works contain evidence of many influences: folk music and its modality come from de Falla, humor takes its inspiration from Schumann, the ethereal coloration owes a debt to the impressionism of Debussy, and much of the sense of the Catalan originates in the music of the Spanish Renaissance. Mompou spent over a half century (from 1918 to 1972) assembling his Cançons i dansas. Each piece in the series pairs a slow, introspective song (cançó) with a lively, rhythmic dance (dansa). Cançons i dansas were not written as a set, but as discrete pieces, later joined together.
Mompou was a self-described “man of few words and a musician of few notes,” opting for an aesthetic of radical simplicity, stillness, and deep introspection. His unique style, often called música callada (“music that has fallen silent”), balances impressionistic chord color with a raw, primal melodic charm.
A Parisian critic, quoted in Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edition, said of Mompou, “If an artist possessed of such magic power had lived in the Middle Ages, he would have been burnt at the stake, for no matter how minutely we analyze Mompou's [work], we cannot discover his secrets. This music, which is so gentle and peaceful, reaches out to unexplored regions of the subconscious.”
Unlike the other fourteen pieces in the collection, Cançó i dansa, No. 6 is completely constructed from original material; Mompou's usual practice was to set existing Catalan folk tunes. One of the most famous and extroverted pieces in his masterwork collection, No. 6, composed in 1942 and published five years later, opens with the Cançó, Cantabile espressivo in the somber key of E-flat minor, with a lyric and expressive melody. It is haunting and melancholic and recalls the nostalgic yearning of a traditional Iberian ballad. Here Mompou includes dense, warm jazz-inflected chords, and sophisticated modal shading. After the meditation is finished, the arrival of the animated Dansa, ritmado (“Rhythmic”) also in E-flat minor, highlights a radiant B-flat major section that is both vigorous and uninhibited. Unlike the more European atmosphere of Mompou's other dances, No. 6 utilizes highly syncopated rhythms traceable to Cuban, Brazilian, and Argentinean folk cultures. It also incorporates West Indian rhythms, which greatly influenced Xavier Montsalvatge, a Spanish composer of a younger generation. Playful and percussive, it includes marcato accents, bright cross-rhythms, and dazzling hand-crossing. This dance energy provides a stunning, strong contrast to the Cançó.
Mompou dedicated Cançó i dansa, No. 6 to the legendary virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein, who performed the work all over the world and frequently used it as an encore.