Dissonances of Modernity: Music, Text, and Performance in Modern Spain

By Aurélie Vialette

Dissonances of Modernity illuminates the ways in which music, as an artifact, a practice, and a discourse redefines established political, social, gender, and cultural conventions in Modern Spain. Using the notion of dissonance as a point of departure, the volume builds on the insightful approaches to the study of music and society offered by previous analyses in regards to the central position they give to identity as a socially and historically constructed concept, and continues their investigation on the interdependence of music and society in the Iberian Peninsula. While other serious studies of the intersections of music and literature in Spain have focused on contemporary usage, Dissonances of Modernity looks back across the centuries, seeking the role of music in the very formation of identity in the peninsula. The volume's historical horizon reaches from the nineteenth-century War of Africa to the Catalan working class revolutions and Enric Granados' central role in Catalan identity; from Francisco Barbieri's Madrid to the Wagnerian's influence in Benito Perez Galdos' prose; and from the predicaments surrounding national anthems to the use of the figure of Carmen in Francoist' cinema. This volume is a timely scholarly addition that contemplates not only a broad corpus that innovatively comprises popular and high culture--zarzuelas, choruses of industrial workers, opera, national anthems--but also their inter-dependence in the artists' creativity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469651934

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IRENE GÓMEZ-CASTELLANO, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

AURÉLIE VIALETTE, Stony Brook University

there is the question of music, which, strangely, is never a question of music alone.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta (xvi)

MUSIC NEVER COMES ALONE. It is everywhere, permeating every level of social practice. It accompanies us in our daily lives, coloring the world in all its forms, from pop, jazz, and electronic, to theatrical, opera, and classical; from the concert halls to the streets, from public to private spaces, from the concrete presence of the earbuds we put in to isolate ourselves and listen to a favorite playlist, to the imaginary spaces in which we dance to internal rhythms. What an odd thing it is says Oliver Sacks at the beginning of Musicophilia, to see an entire species —billions of people— playing with, listening to, meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call ‘music’ (x).

Such societal ubiquity of music means that it permeates the spheres of other arts, and spills beyond them. Its function is able to shift from the creation of beauty and pleasure to active participation in politics. What is more, that participation is far from fleeting. According to Pascal Quignard in The Hatred of Music, "[t]o hear is to be touched from afar. Rhythm is linked to vibration. That is how music creates an involuntary intimacy between juxtaposed bodies. To hear is to obey. To listen in Latin is obaudire. Obaudire has survived in French as obéir. Hearing, audientia ... is an obedience" (72). The dynamic and tempo of music can capture entire groups and lead them to obey through the construction of a sound landscape (Vialette 50–51). Because of its omnipresence, and the involuntary intimacy that it creates, music can be one of the most powerful tools in the creation of a sense of community. It becomes, then, a power used by governments and political groups in the erecting of national identities, in the delineation of values and the universalizing of the individual (Quignard 82).

Music, according to recent ethnomusicological studies such Sílvia Martínez and Héctor Fouce’s groundbreaking Made in Spain: Studies in Popular Music, has to be seen as both a practice and a discourse:

Music is an artifact; it has a material existence through records or performances that take place in cafés, theaters or clubs; it reaches people through the radio, the cinema, the television or on the Internet; it is embedded in mediation processes of publication, dissemination, censorship, and reception. But at the same time, music is a signifying practice able to express identities, conflicts and tensions, to provide narratives, and adapt to the social environment of musicians and listeners. (xiii)

As much as music permeates political discourse and colors so much of human experience, it inhabits literature as well, as both artifact and discourse, through the inscription of its material presence and through its shaping of social and political identities. This inclusion of the musical in the literary is only natural, us being, according to Sacks, as much musical beings as linguistic ones. In a prime example, in Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann relates that Adrian Leverkühn would first conceptualize his scores and only then compose them. Be it for philosophical, political, or aesthetic purposes, music and words have always been intertwined and even inseparable.

Yet when music appears represented in literature, as if in a musical score, it is transformed into a silent experience, the vibration of notes and harmonies, of melodies and dissonances, are muted by their inscription on the page. In that translation, however, from the audible to the visual, literary texts gain new dimension and offer for their readers a means of accessing new depths of representation —be it political, social, or of identity. One main question remains, however, regarding the status of representativity of music out of the musical sphere. Where does music reside when it is transported to literature? What is the cognitive process through which one reads and, through reading, is able to hear music? Susan Boynton tells us, in Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain, that music has been represented through many forms throughout time but that we do not really know how it sounds. This is what she calls silent music (2011). It comes thus as a logical outcome that researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences have become interested in what music means for literary, cultural, social, and political studies. In their edited volume Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, Richard Leppert and Susan McClary affirm that music had been strangely absent from interdisciplinary academic activities in literature departments. Since then (the volume was published in 1987), cultural studies have created space for musical and ethnomusical studies within other disciplines, and researchers have certainly established what Leppert and McClary aimed for, that is, connections between substance of music and social values (xiii).

In Iberian studies, researchers have lately begun to emphasize the central place of music in society, particularly in the context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as is the case with the vo­lume Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film and Rock Culture (2007) edited by Randolph Pope and Christine Henseler; Silvia Bermúdez and Jorge Pérez’s Special Issue Spanish Popular Music Studies for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies in 2009; and Stephanie Sieburth’s Survival Songs: Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror (2014). Silvia Bermúdez’s Rocking the Boat: Migration and Contemporary Spanish Music (2018) is one of the many recent studies that incorporate analysis of musical production, showing how it reflects social anxieties and political concerns. Likewise, Jo Labanyi’s Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice (2002) offers insight on the role played by flamenco, folkloric film musicals, Galician bagpipes, and digital music in the construction of Spanish identity. Music and its relationship with identity politics are certainly relevant to and represented in interdisciplinary studies on Spanish modern and contemporary society: from Samuel Llano’s Whose Spain? Negotiations Spanish Music in Paris, 1908–1929 (2013), which concentrates on case studies to show how Spanish identity was shaped through the reception of its music in an international context; to William Washa­baughs, Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain (2012) a book that focuses on how flamenco music is used as a patrimonial identity symbol in southern Spain; to the pioneering work of Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco Deep Song (1994), which focuses on flamenco to construct a cultural psychology of Spain and to demystify the cultural and social practices around the genre; and to Jorge Pérez’ research on flamenco fusion (2015). Finally, Jennifer Smith and Lisa Nalbone’s edition of Intersections of Race, Class, Gender and Nation in Fin-de-Siècle Spa­nish Literature and Culture (2017), although not focused exclusively on music, contains several chapters dealing with the popular zarzue­la genre and offers a way of thinking about cultural and literary history that illuminate our current project, Dissonances of Modernity.

Of course, musicologists in Spain have paved the road for cultural critics to enter the world of music. Musicology scholarship such as Emilio Casares’s on zarzuelas (1999) and operas (2017), and Jacinto Torres on Spanish musical romanticism (1982) and on Isaac Albéniz (2008), to name a few, have been instrumental in making visible the kind of musical creativity that intersected with cultural and political production in modern Spain. Likewise, the work of Celsa Alonso González thoroughly studied the social implications of musical practice in the nineteenth century (1993, 1999, 2001) and made important contributions to the problematics of popular and high music in compositors such as Felipe Pedrell (1991).

This book builds on the insightful approaches to the study of music and society offered by previous studies in regards to the central position they give to identity as a socially and historically constructed concept, and continues their investigation of the interdependence of music and society in the Iberian Peninsula. While other serious studies of the intersections of music and literature in Spain have focused on contemporary usage, Dissonances of Modernity looks back across the centuries, seeking the role of music in the very formation of identity in the peninsula. Its historical horizon reaches from the nineteenth-century War of Africa to the Catalan working class revolutions and Enric Granados’s central role in Catalan identity; from Francisco Barbieri’s Madrid to the Wagnerian’s influence in Benito Pérez Galdós’s prose; from the problematics surrounding national anthems to the use of the figure of Carmen in Francoist’ cinema. Furthermore, it comes as a necessary supplement for our field in that it contemplates a broad corpus that innovatively comprises popular and high culture —zarzuelas, choruses of industrial workers, opera, national anthems— and their inter-dependence in the artists’ creativity. Furthermore, this volume illuminates the ways in which music, as a practice, an artifact, and a discourse, redefines established political, social, gender, and cultural conventions.

Why, then, do we call our volume Dissonances of Modernity? Since the book approaches the connections between music, literature, culture and politics through the notion of Spanish modernity, the dissonances are the expressions of discontent with the civilizing notion of modernity. In music, as in poetry, the term dissonance is used to describe the mingling of discordant sounds that embody a lack of harmony but that can contain an attempt to arrive at some kind of reconciliation. Adopted by cultural studies, the term cultural dissonance describes the confusion that people can experience when their ideas and values do not conform to those that surround them, often when in a foreign space or when the world around them experiences sudden changes that clash with their ideals. Social psychologists have observed that cultural dissonance can prevent a complete adaptation to a socio-cultural environment. Individuals who suffer from cultural dissonance can, according to Carola and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco in Children of Immigration (2001), adopt three patterns of adjustment: first, attempts to synthesize two cultural traditions or synthesizing; second, passing as a member of the dominant group or disguising; and lastly, developing a defensive identity or creating mechanisms of defense, sometimes involving violence or gang membership, or defense. By applying these concepts to an analysis of Spanish modernity, we will find that Spain has suffered, as a collective body, from a certain internal and external cultural dissonance, which can offer a new perspective on extant lines of investigation.

When discussing modernity, historians and cultural critics alike mention its supposed imperfection. Michael Iarocci in Properties of Modernity (2006), has addressed how the question of representational dominance builds historical discourse and dominant cultural narratives, in which Spain was displaced to the periphery of the mo-dern within the European imaginary (xi). The clash between two deeply polarized worlds (conservative Catholicism vs. progressive modernization), or between two notions of Spanishness (Bourbon centralism vs. Iberian multiculturalism), can be seen as elements of an unresolved crisis of modernization that still reverberates in Spanish culture and identity. Civil wars, colonial traumas on both sides of the Atlantic, dictatorships, and the current crisis are but the most visible signs of this long process. Further, according to Jo Labanyi, Spain’s history from the Enlightenment on has tended to be evaluated, by historians and literary scholars alike, in terms of a certain model of modernity based on capitalist modernization, which supposedly was realized perfectly in the countries of northern Europe. The result has been an assumption that the modern history of Spain has been marked by a failure to achieve modernity (Memory and Modernity 89). The use of dissonance, then, avoids the perils of comparing Spain to an ‘alien model’ of modernization based exclusively on capitalist parameters, offering a new perspective on the tensions that still vibrate along the fault lines of culture.

The expression dissonances of modernity, as applied to Spain, on the one hand stresses this historical background in its longue durée, and on the other brings the concept of cultural dissonance into deeper contact with its roots in the musical and poetic nature of ‘dissonance’ itself. Music, like literature, in both highbrow settings and in popular forms, has the power to carry and subvert collective notions of identity and political aspirations, and can help to visualize tensions or sublimate them for big audiences; this is why this volume includes analyses of musical genres considered both High and Low Culture, and their relationships with literature, social movements, visual culture, and armed conflict. The heterogeneous chapters that comprise Dissonances of Modernity study how music intersects with literary texts and cultural and political events in the long period in which Spain forms or disforms its national identity: from 1700, with the arrival of the French-based Bourbon dynasty after the War of Spanish Succession, to the present. In this fashion, the volume is a trans-historical and interdisciplinary approach to Iberian studies. Dissonances of Modernity offers the opportunity to go back in time, and to explore, from the perspectives of diverse methodologies, the intersections between music, literature, and culture that have shaped the historical processes that in turn lead to the definition of identities in the Iberian Peninsula. Although the field of Musicology has always paid attention to the history of Spanish music in relation to culture (and we have included several authors that are musicologists in the most strict sense), we conceive Dissonances of Modernity as an invitation to both musicologists and critics of Iberian culture to embrace the theoretical tools and methodologies of other disciplines and to see where this sense of scholarly dissonance, the discomfort of moving beyond one’s fields of expertise, can take us. With this invitation in mind provided by the editors, the authors of Dissonan-ces have unveiled dimensions that were previously silent to scholars of Iberian culture. One of the most rewarding surprises was to see how different the notion of modernity is when literature is seen from a musical perspective. There are many ways of understanding modernity in eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. An emphasis on opera, choral music, zarzuela and género chico, as well as in performance history and practice, has led the editors to see in literature a resonance of the voice. The chapters amplify the necessity of literary authors to both convey a sense of voice, to embrace a multiplicity of voices, and the challenge of using a silent media to convey the many intersections produced by the narration of sound and its uses. In that sense, it is not a coincidence that Dissonances of Modernity emerges in the same moment when the humanities have devoted their attention to both Affect Studies and Sound Studies, as we will later see.

Dissonances of Modernity contributes to awaken the silent soundscape that was the script that accompanied readers when they approached the works of Leopoldo Alas, Benito Pérez Galdós, Faustina Sáez y Melgar, Cecilia Böhl de Faber, and Federico García Lorca. Each intervention picks apart the melodies of musical patterns in the works presented to our readers. They open pockets of sounds within the texts, allowing them to express political and cultural ‘noise,’ to use the concept in the current academic blooming field of Sound Studies. Further, they create harmonies across genres and styles, taking us to war and to the stage, interrogating myths of hegemonic identity and teasing apart the intersectional fabric of identity. In order to organize a volume of such broad scope, and to facilitate internal harmonies, the chapters have been grouped into three sections. Together, the chorus of authors creates a ‘dissonance’ within the field of Iberian Studies by seeing sound in silent texts and by questioning categorizations that are sometimes limiting. While a unified voice will not be achieved, it is in the many different critical voices emerging at the same time where our contribution to the notion of Iberian ‘modernities’ takes its dissonant shape. The first section, Music and National Dissonances, focuses on the construction of national identities, through the musicalization of the lesser-known historical episode of the War on Africa of 1859 (Ana Rueda), the portrayal of national identity and working-class social conflicts in terms of popular music (Aurélie Vialette and Jordi Marí) and Wagnerian tradition (Walter Clark), and an interrogation of the myth of Carmen as an embodiment of Spanish identity (José Colmeiro). In the second section, Zarzuelas and Theatre: Dissonances of Modernity on Stage, David Gies’s work on nineteenth-century Spanish theater dialogues with both the work of Yuri Porras on the zarzuela and Lucy Harney’s study of the tona-dilla escénica. The third section, Gender Dissonances: Crosswords between Opera, Literature, and the Modern Artist, takes as its point of focus the intersections of gender and class with the figure of the musical artist, complicating the figure of the blind singer in the picaresque and naturalist modes (Vernon Chamberlin), reading Wagner, favorite composer of the Catalan Renaixença, in Galdós (Thomas R. Franz), and approaching the figure of the opera singer Serafina Gorgheggi as a cultural node where anxieties surrounding female artistic power were contended in fictional terms (Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Margot Versteeg).

Dissonances of Modernity opens with Ana Rueda’s Orchestrating War: Burlesque Musical Pieces on the War of Africa (1856–1860). For Rueda, theater, and lyric theater in particular, were at the core of cultural and social life in nineteenth-century Spain. Given that focus for social life, it is not surprising that the War of Africa produced a wealth of theatrical pieces, hastily written and composed in response to the circumstances. Dissonant musical sounds and voices in these staged performances of war-as-play express paradoxical tensions between Spaniards and the enemy, grief and cruelty mixed with comical effects and false resolutions. These stridencies are examined here as manifestations of a cultural and ideological dissonance linked to Spain’s colonial politics and the denigration of the colonized. This dissonance underscores the confrontation between the two countries at war —Spain and Morocco— and reveals regional fissures within Spain’s construction of a unifying patriotic discourse and national identity, thereby casting ambiguity on the plays’ purported glorification of Spanish colonialism in Africa.

Social harmony and political dissonances are centered in Aurélie Vialette’s Massive Harmonies, as the chapter focuses on working class choral music in nineteenth-century Catalonia. The creator studied here, Josep Anselm Clavé, staged the working class and made them perform popular music as well as opera compositions (Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, or Gaetano Donizzetti) which aimed to rework artistic and social divisions. The workers were the first to perform Wagner in Spain —they sang Tannhaüser’s Triumphal March, a musical event that the chapter analyses. This chapter explores how modern industrial societies, specifically Catalonia, made use of the discourse of love and the rhetoric of affect through music to organize the masses of workers in a harmonious way in the public sphere. Culture in everyday life is in fact central to understanding how emotional and political discourses intersect. Vialette concentrates on how musical representations put bodies and emotions at play to create such an intersection, and argues that music was a powerful medium through which social and linguistic divisions between the working class and the rest of society, as well as between Madrid and Catalonia, were being reworked.

In Lands Without a Song: Autonomous Communities’ Quest for an Anthem, Jorge Marí explores the representational functions of anthems, their ability to promote and channel emotions, their power to form collective audiences, their usefulness in the process of ima­gining communities, and their suitability as elements of the state’s ideological apparatus. Echoing the Spanish Constitution of 1978, all seventeen Estatutos de Autonomía, as recognized by the Spanish Comunidades Autónomas in the late 1970s and early 80s, proclaimed that their corresponding Communities would have their own official symbols, including their own anthems. While most of the Communities were fast to choose theirs, Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, and Murcia have remained officially anthem-less to this day. Focusing on Castilla y León, Marí’s essay explores the reasons behind this si­tuation as well as the political and social debates sparked by it. He also analyzes some of the anthems that have been proposed through the years, together with those that have been unofficially adopted. This inquiry is placed within a questioning of the concept of Autonomous Community —an entity that, while it may incorporate elements from the federal state or the nation, ultimately differs from both.

José Colmeiro’s "Remaking the Ready-Made Espagnolade: Carmen in Spanish Cinema" examines the different forms of cultural reappropriation undergone by the enduring myth of Carmen, which has become one of the most recognizable and recurring elements of the espagnolade, that quintessential spectacle of Spanishness. The espagnolade has been at the crossroads of divergent discourses (national and foreign), and different artistic expressions, such as music, dance, and literature since the nineteenth century, before its passage to cinema and video in the twentieth century. This diversity of representations through the years has reflected the cultural and political tensions brought on by modernity, as different anxieties around issues of race, language, gender, and national identity, are unraveled, thus creating cultural dissonances and fissures within an apparently homogeneous and stereotypical ready-made form that aims to fix and affirm a national character. The starting point for this chapter is the film Carmen, la de Triana (1938), the first sound version of Carmen in Spanish, which generated its own instant remake in German, Andalusische Nächte, both shot in Germany during the Spanish Civil war. Colmeiro then examines the postwar remake Carmen la de Ronda (1959), an international Spanish-French-Italian coproduction, and finally the post-Franco remake La niña de tus ojos (1999), a metafictional trilingual (Spanish, German, Russian) espagnolade which remakes both Carmen, la de Triana and Andalusische Nächte.

Finally, Walter Clark, in Enric Granados and His Catalan Literary Associations, explores the fundamental dissonance between regional, national, and international affiliations in the works of composer Enric (Enrique) Granados (1867–1916). Although he is best known for his piano solos, songs, and opera inspired by the art and times of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), in fact Granados also invested enormous time and energy in producing a sizable body of songs and plays in Catalan and by Catalan authors: artistic collaborations that Clark’s chapter examines. These texts, which have lain in relative obscurity since the early 1900s, now take on real significance in light of the recent revival of Catalan nationalism.

The second section focuses on zarzuelas and theater. In "Music, Text, and Performing Cultural Identity in Francisco Barbieri’s (1823–1894) El barberillo de Lavapiés (1874)," Yuri Porras analyzes the various functions of music ––instruments, dances, and songs–– in one of modern zarzuela seminal works, El barberillo de Lavapiés. It particularly emphasizes Barbieri as the embodiment of the confluence between music and literature in the nineteenth century and beyond. Further, Porras sets this zarzuela forth as a microcosm that reflects a constant musical-ideological dissonance and struggle for the appropriation of Spanish identity (Spanishness) between two schools of composers and librettists: those who searched within Spain’s music-literary tradition to create an authentic native theatrical form, and those who saw in German, French, and Italian Opera, models to imitate. This chapter illustrates important characteristics of this zarzuela’s music, and frames it in the subgenre as not only a type of resistance to foreign influences and musical elitism, but also as an assimilation of such foreign influences into a national identity. Finally, it addresses a lacuna in the study of intersections between music and literature in the evolution of Spanish lyric theater, which in the nineteenth century culminates with the zarzuela.

Musicologists and literary critics alike view Lorca’s works as analogous to musical scores, as performances in waiting. In "Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto and Lorca’s Don Perlimplín" Nelson Orringer develops a comparison between Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto, third movement (1923–26), and Lorca’s tragic farce Amor de Don Perlim-plín con Belisa en su jardín (1924–29) examining analogies between the two works on multiple levels. From the historical perspective, both creators cultivate Neoclassicism, ironically modernizing traditional themes by passing them through a sonata-allegro binary form, as practiced by Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757). The thematic disposition of both pieces represents a surprising abstraction of their original themes: in Falla’s case, the villancico De los álamos vengo, madre; in Lorca’s case, the medieval balladic theme of the ill-wed beauty. Lorca’s abstraction process relies on historical ideas of Ortega and character paradigms of Unamuno to portray the protagonist Don Perlimplín’s rise from impotence to heroism.

In ‘Philarmonic Furor’ and the Dual Role of Music in Nineteenth-Century Spain, David Gies shows that Spain was hardly exempt from the wave of frenzy for opera and symphonic music that swept out of Italy and across Europe during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Using as a case study the famous eighteenth-century tonadillas —short satirical musical interludes spaced before, between or following the acts of longer theater pieces— Gies demonstrates the trajectory toward opera and the symphony through Spain’s long and distinguished tradition of incorporating song and music into theater performances. Nevertheless, it was not until the 1820s and 1830s that a true furor filarmónico took root in Spanish entertainment circles as something new —an anxiety concerning modernity— seemed to grip musicians and audiences alike.

Lucy D. Harney’s chapter, "Social Typology and costumbrismo in the tonadilla escénica," explains one of the most popular forms of late eighteenth-century Spanish theater, the satirical genre known as the tonadilla, which may be defined as a brief, festive performance performed for popular audiences. Gradually, this short, detached musical form began to accompany dances of various sorts, until when, during the eighteenth century, the term tonadilla came to refer to texts accompanied by music that are inserted into theatrical works. The persistent commercial success of this form, along with that of other, similarly popular genres, represents a popular disregard for Enlightenment aesthetics and notions of dramatic propriety. Along with other forms of popular entertainment, the tonadilla’s more crowd-pleasing tendencies, such as farcical humor, formulaic narratives, and droll character types, inevitably provoked accusations of crudity and backwardness on the part of elite commentators. This aesthetic dissonance is illuminated by Bakhtin’s discussion of the Enlightenment’s programmatic misunderstanding of traditional carnivalesque elements of popular culture, especially those that embody festive laughter. The success of this genre bespeaks mass entertainment’s resistance to the cultural refashioning aimed at by the Spanish Enlightenment.

Dissonances of Modernity ends with essays that link gender, musical genres, and the figure of the musical artist, as well as essays that advance scholarship on music in realist and naturalist literature. The panic over the professionalization of women, which represented a potential threat to the ideal of domestic propriety, extended across many areas of artistic endeavor, including music. Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s essay, The Mute Muse, looks at texts in which women’s potential musical talents are kept in check, including Faustina Sáez y Melgar’s Angela o el ramillete de jazmines, Cecilia Böhl de Faber’s La Gaviota, Leopoldo Alas’s Su único hijo, Benito Pérez Galdós’s Tristana and Jacinto Picón’s Dulce y sabrosa. In these novels about women with uncommon talent and ambition, danger lurks at every turn: envy, seduction, diminished femininity, disease, and the specter of suffocating domesticity turn women into mute reminders not only of the trials that await those who dare to step out of their place in the home, but also of the panic that the gifted woman symbolized in a century that magnified gender difference. These stories are examined through the lens of failure, in which the dominant tropes of purposeful rejection of success or, on the contrary, undeserved rejection and defeat reveal telling instances of gender unease. Behind these common stories of failure that doom women to silence hide subtle vindications of feminine talent that reveal a latent discomfort with the prevailing gender ideology.

Margot Versteeg’s "Between Sublime Performance and Filthy Lucre: The Voice of Serafina Gorgheggi in Su único hijo by Leopoldo Alas," which explores how Alas uses the figure of Serafina Gorghe-ggi, an opera singer and one of the female protagonists of the novel, to reflect upon the role and value of the (performance) artist in capitalist modernity. On the rare occasion that Serafina performs at the service of the creative artist, her voice is priceless. More frequently, however, the singer abuses art for her personal gain at the expense of her voice, producing only dissonances. And Serafina is not the only performer who recurs to this kind of practices. Denouncing the nineteenth-century middle classes’ fetishistic adoration of these highly opportunistic and rather mediocre opera artists, Leopoldo Alas criticizes the degrading commercialization of art within a capitalist system that values any transaction (economic, social, cultural) only through its potential for monetary return.

In "Galdós’s Gloria: Tweaking the Paradigm of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer," Thomas R. Franz underscores the relationships between various musical compositions and the structure and characterization of many of Galdós’s works. Franz’s focus is Gloria (1877–78), whose motifs and technical resources have previously been linked with the librettos of Halévy’s La Juive and Gounod’s Faust. These suggestions notwithstanding, this chapter posits a strong relationship between Gloria and Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843): Galdós’s model for his wandering Jew, Daniel Morton, is the same one that Wagner had used; his storm scenes duplicate Wagner’s; and his crowd scenes, replete with the exposition of conflicting opinions, match Wagner’s choruses, among other things. Galdós’s vision, despite many similarities, departs radically from Wagner’s. What he does retain is a synthesis predicated upon the quest for an illusive ideal, expressed either musically or through a narrative coda. Throughout his novel, Galdós appears to struggle with decisions over the quantity of female independence and adherence to the old romance chronotope that his own realist esthetics and highly problematic public might tolerate.

Finally, the book closes with Vernon Chamberlin’s chapter, The Blind Street Singer in the Novels of Galdós and the Short Stories of His Contemporaries, where he interrogates a character who, since the time of Homer, has been a prototype throughout the Mediterranean world that appears across geographic and religious borders. Chamberlin argues that in Spain, the blind singer of ballads (and other kinds of songs) had become a tipo costumbrista long before the advent of Realist fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Evidence of this may be found not only in diverse literary genres during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but also in the paintings of Goya, in the sainetes of Ramón de la Cruz, in lyric theater, in costumbrista collections, and in magazines. Vernon passed away while we were in the final stages of the edition of this volume. As a specialist of nineteenth-century Spanish literature and its relationship to music, we would have been delighted to have him hold this volume in his hands.

As the three parts of this volume suggest, music is indeed a political vehicle through which social tensions and ideas are transmitted by and to citizens, from national identity to gender, on the public stage. We cannot forget, with Jonathan Sterne’s classic The Audible Past, that sound reproduction, storage and creation are dependent upon material conditions, on the acoustic practices ––that is, the material practices–– that create them. An archeological view of a historical soundscape reminds us of the marvelous fact that a book, this book for example, is also a way to transmit, recreate and render metaphorically audible the sounds of the past, the music of nineteenth-century Spain, the vibrating, involuntary intimacy of the writers and readers of Modern Spain. We have aimed at offering one more layer of connection to music and acoustic sources by preparing a group of sound files that accompany several of the chapters of this volume. The readers will find the reference to these files in the body of the text as they would in the case of an illustration or a table, and will be able to access them by entering into the site provided in the Sound File section at the beginning of the book. Although we try to approximate the experience of sound, there we have our final dissonance: the experience granted by reading the music in the text, resonating against the visual materiality of the written word. Even in the face of all of the dimensions that the music in these pages offers to us, although we speak of music in literature, of music as a material practice, we cannot actually access the music about which these authors spoke. We cannot hear Serafina Gorgheggi’s voice, nor the strains of any melody enclosed in these pages as it was imagined or performed; in this sense this music is truly, in the words of Lou Charnon-Deutsch, a mute muse. And yet, she is ours.

WORKS CITED

Alonso González, Celsa. Felip Pedrell y la canción culta con acompañamiento en la España decimonónica: la difícil convivencia de lo popular y lo culto. Recerca Musicològica, vol. 11–12, 1991, pp. 305–28.

______. Un espacio de sociabilidad musical en la España romántica: las sociedades instructo-recreativas. Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana,vol. 8–9, 2001, pp. 17–40.

______. Un legado singular: la música lírica en la corte de los duques de Montpensier. El Museo Canario, vol. 54, no. 2, 1999, pp. 447–62.

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