On Sunday, February 18, nearly 600 people from Burgos attended an unusual event at the Teatro Principal of Burgos: the first stage performance of an opera that was composed almost 100 years ago.
His score was written in 1925, at the age of 22, by Antonio José Martínez Palacios from Burgos (artistically “Antonio José”), who would be shot in 1936 without accusation or trial by the troops rebelling against the Republic, when he had only turned 33. It is still unknown what unreason led to that murder.
In his very short life, Antonio José directed the Orfeón Burgalés, composed the
Hymn to Castilla
and created more than 150 works.
Some of them were then performed by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and the guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza (the same one who premiered
The Concert of Aranjuez
, by maestro Joaquín Rodrigo) and by prestigious Spanish and European symphonies, including the Bilbao Orchestra guided by Vladimir Golschmann in 1929 and, more recently, the Dresden Philharmonic in 2010. At barely 30 years old, the musician from Burgos himself conducted several of his pieces in November 1934 at the head of the Madrid Symphony Orchestra at the Monumental Theatre.
Maurice Ravel said of him that he was going to be the great Spanish composer of the 20th century.
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The day after that concert in Madrid, the newspaper
Abc
commented (November 13, 1934): "(...) Antonio José, young composer and author of many works, directed a prelude and a popular dance, and the public rewarded him with a prolonged ovation and an exit to the stage.
(…) The prelude has something of a sentimental and loving evocation, which is followed by the youthful irruption of girls and boys who dance in plain tunes of joy, and honest composition and numbers of noble Castilianism.
(…).
The author goes through an ordeal analogous to the one that Falla went through one day with his
Brief Life
and may heaven that, like the glorious Cadiz teacher, the pilgrim from Burgos obtains the achievement of his generous adventures, for those manifestations of pure art are well needed. modern Spanish music.”
Furthermore, Antonio José compiled a very valuable songbook with melodies that he himself collected in the towns: the
Collection of popular songs from Burgos
, with which he won the national music prize in 1932.
But Franco's dictatorship covered his life, his death and his legacy with a cloak of lead.
The family kept all the pentagrams with zeal and fear in a chest underground, until democracy arrived.
And the local and regional authorities later delayed in raising that slab, as shown by this late premiere and also by the fact that the other opera of his handwriting,
El mozo de mulas
, has not yet had a stage performance, but only a musical and vocal performance (in 2017!), despite the fact that the score was found almost complete, lacking part of the orchestration of the second of its three acts.
Antonio José was precisely playing on the piano in that same Teatro Principal de Burgos some fragments of that opera - based on a passage from Don
Quixote
- on July 18, 1936, hours before the news of the military uprising against the Republic reached the city. .
Four months later they had already shot him.
The lyrical drama that premiered this Sunday is set in colonial India and is titled
Minatchi
, the name of the king's daughter.
Its musical version was premiered in 2022 in Burgos, and in this case it has finally been shown on stage.
Now, the score that was preserved in the Municipal Archive only contains the voices and the piano, and is also missing the libretto (which was authored by the priest Gaspar González-Pintado), so the original plot has remained in the air. .
A moment from the performance of 'Minatchi', this Sunday at the Teatro Principal of Burgos. BURGOS CITY COUNCIL
Curiously, the religious Cornelius E. Byrne translated the sung part into English (perhaps also the missing dialogues), a very unique rarity at the time but perhaps explainable by the fact that Byrne lived in Burgos for a year and that both he and González-Pintado They were Jesuits.
This opera, which concludes with a vibrant final chorus, narrates the return of Princess Minatchi to India after converting to Christianity, and the rejection she finds in a population that continues to worship pagan gods.
The Burgos director Javier Castro, 49 years old, a great connoisseur of the work of Antonio José, has completed that song and piano composition to expand it to a group of 14 instruments;
and Edurne Rubio, the artistic director, has created a concept that links the different scenes through labels projected on the background of the stage to contextualize the situations, even express doubts about the incomplete plot and let the audience complete the story for themselves.
The solo performances were led by the sopranos Sandra Redondo (Minatchi), Ana Romero and Ana Serrano, the tenor Adolfo Muñoz and the baritone Daniel Estévez, supported by the Ars Nova choir and the instrumental group of the Burgos Symphony Orchestra.
Elena Davidson was in charge of stage management.
The audience, standing up, rewarded all of them with an ovation of almost six minutes, and they had to repeat the succession of final greetings one by one.
Minatchi is the third great work of Antonio José, after
El mozo de mulas
and his
Sinfonía castellana
.
Andrés Ruiz Tarazona, then music critic for EL PAÍS, wrote in 1981 that his
Burgos Dances
for piano were worthy of being placed alongside the best
Spanish Dances by Granados.
Director Javier Castro learned about Antonio José Martínez Palacios around 1986, when he was 12 or 13 years old.
His music teacher, Javier Zárate, gave him a copy of the biography written by the Burgos musicologist Miguel Ángel Palacios (no family relation to the composer), the poet Jesús Barriuso and the historian Fernando García Romero.
A few years later, he was already singing with a choir from his city the harmonizations that Antonio José had devised on those popular melodies.
And he himself composed some more polyphonies based on other traditional songs recovered by the composer.
The orchestra director Javier Castro, in a promotional image of his website. JUAN LUIS
At the end of 2018, Castro read Minatchi
's score
kept in the Municipal Archive.
That awakened a new curiosity in him, as he says over a beer and a skewer in a bar in Burgos: “I dedicated the first part of my research to finding the script.
And then the time came to accept that we don't have it and to take action looking for a way to put the story back together.
We simply have to humbly assume that we cannot recreate the dramaturgy of the work as it was, and that we will always be inventing our own solution.
But from the beginning I tried to make this fact not a frustration but a challenge.”
From there, he got to work expanding the piano score for orchestra.
-Did you feel that Antonio José was watching you from behind?
"Not exactly feeling like he was watching me..., rather I've had the feeling of getting to know him better, of becoming more friends."
Once
Minatchi premiered this past Sunday in Burgos, the challenge of achieving the complete stage representation of
El mozo de mulas
still remains
.
Castro shows his doubts in this regard, but also a certain confidence: “It is difficult, due to the situation of Spanish opera.
In general, due to the little real interest there is in the large programming of theaters and concert halls to preserve and disseminate our musical heritage.
And yet,
its enormous quality and strength make me optimistic about the premiere of
El mozo de mula ;
It is a powerful work that also accompanies a dramaturgy that can work very well.
I am convinced that he will ever get the opportunity he deserves.”
When that happens, if it happens, there will still be one last debt owed to Antonio José: finding his mortal remains, buried near Estépar, about 20 kilometers from Burgos, in a place that is only known to have been there on October 9, 1936. Gunshots broke the silence of the early morning.
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