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Work

Joaquín Rodrigo

Joaquín Rodrigo Composer

4 Madrigales amatorios, for voice and piano (or orchestra)   

Performances: 3
Tracks: 12
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Musicology:
  • 4 Madrigales amatorios, for voice and piano (or orchestra)
    Year: 1947
    Genre: Other Solo Vocal
    Pr. Instrument: Voice
    • 1.Con qué la lavaré?
    • 2.Vos me matasteis
    • 3.De dónde venis, amore?
    • 4.De los Alamos vengo, madre
These four wonderfully lyrical and peculiar love songs have both a neo-classical flavor in the style of their music and a surrealistic flavor in the handling and content of the texts.

"¿Con qué la lavaré?" has a touching Baroque-aria sound in F minor, with passing tones forming modern harmonies. The music could accompany a religious text, but is here a lament that asks with what substance the singer should wash his/her face. Shall it be "timidly...with cascades of lemon water" or "with grief and sadness"?

"Vos me matásteis" has the style of a Bach aria with an Italianate influence. The simple contrapuntal style is a perfect musical match for a text concerning someone enchanted with a young virgin girl on the banks of a river who has remarkable hair in which he feels tied up—"you have killed me," he says. Beautiful Dorian-mode harmonies begin the work. The text, which is only four lines long, is repeated in isolated phrases and reharmonized, taking on a surreal character as a result of this obsessiveness. For example, the words "vos me matásteis" soon are accompanied by descending fourths that alter its originally rich Baroque harmonies into a higher, dry, crystalline territory. The harmony becomes even more advanced with the description "riberas de un río" (on the shores of a river), where the text is accompanied by major seventh chords.

The charming "¿De dónde venís, amore?" is reminiscent of Mozart's Ein musikalischer Spass, and is in a jolly Allegro grazioso tempo. There is an ecstatic joy and a kind of teasing to the repetition of the text which continually inquires as to the direction a beloved one is going: "I see it is outside...and that's good to know," followed by "ah ah ah ah" on high staccatos over a major third. The melody itself has a lively Latin folk flavor accompanied by "wrong-note" tone clusters and tinkling motoric patterns.

"De los álamos vengo, madre" in a 2/4 Allegro has a sonatina-like piano introduction with rotating figures around a pedal point that eventually change into straightforward Spanish guitar rhythms. These underscore the text, which urges a mother to go to a stand of poplar trees. There is a steadily increasing Spanish-style melisma and skips of a perfect fourth in those passages that refer to the swaying of the trees in the wind. The text repeats and gradually adds more lines, eventually unfolding a complete image in which the mother is urged to go to see the popular trees in Seville, where the singer's beautiful girlfriend lives. The final exhortation is accompanied by light music box-like tinkling patterns in the high piano registers at a pianissimo dynamic, which leaves an aura of unreality hanging in the air at the conclusion of the whole set.

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