AWKWARD
ENCOUNTERS 1009
In
the summer of 1907 Spanish pianist and composer Manuel de Falla piled up his
meager savings and went to Paris in the hope of breaking into the international
music scene. He was in for some setbacks.
The
jobs he had arranged fell through, and after playing piano with a traveling
pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony
students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a
friend. “There was no future for me there.”
He
set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer
was a bad time for it because many of them were out of town, although Frenchman
Paul Dukas went out of his way to be helpful and introduced him to the
influential Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz.
Getting
to know the celebrated Claude Debussy would not go so smoothly.
Fall
finally met him in October, played the piano score of his opera “La vida breve” for
him, and found the Frenchman’s sarcasm a little intimidating.
A
little later, Falla’s shyness made for an even more awkward encounter.
Falla
came to visit Debussy, was told that he was out, and was ushered by a servant
to a dark alcove off the dining room, a storage space filled with grotesque
Chinese masks. After a while Falla heard Debussy, his wife Emma, and composer
Erik Satie come into the dining room and begin lunch. Falla was too timid to
enter the dining room unannounced and sat there in the dark alcove, faint from
hunger, staring at the weird and ghoulish faces of the masks.
When
the chatting and clatter of lunch seemed loud enough to cover his retreat, he
slipped into a dim hallway and hastened toward the egress, only to bump
headfirst into Debussy’s wife, who screamed.
Even
though everybody encouraged Falla to join them for lunch, he was so rattled by
the encounter that he made his apologies and departed.
VERSATILE ENOUGH
The string
quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to
be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin and since he
was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his
attention to composing music.
Franklin
played the harp, the guitar and something called the glass dulcimer, but his
best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The
instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck
performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water”,
accompanied by an entire orchestra.
In 1762,
during a sojourn in London, Franklin described in a letter his improvement of
the musical glasses by fitting glass bowls concentrically on a horizontal rod,
which was turned by a crank attached to a pedal. The turning of the bowls kept
them moist by passing them through water, and enabled the performer to stroke
their rims with a minimum of motions. Franklin’s new instrument, which he
called the armonica, was fairly popular in America, but quite the
rage in Europe.
A few years
later, in a letter to a friend in Edinburgh, Franklin wrote a short treatise on
music theory, setting down his ideas about the nature of melody and harmony,
and in a letter to his brother Peter he favored clarity and simplicity in vocal
music and took issue with the relatively intricate arias of recent operas and
oratorios in the Italian style.
The
intriguing string quartet
attributed to Franklin probably says a lot less about his musical tastes. The
manuscript, with Franklin’s name on it, was discovered in Paris in the 1940s,
but since then, copies have turned up in Prague, Vienna, and elsewhere, each
attributed to a different prominent composer of the time. It’s quite possible
that the scientist, statesman, and inventor was simply too busy to write music.
