Manuel Blancafort was born (the fourth of ten children, and he went on to have eleven himself) in La Garriga. His father, a cultured man, specialised in choral music, so Manuel's budding talents won't have gone unnoticed. The family business was a spa, the 'Balneari Blancafort de La Garriga', and there MB would have met some illustrious figures come for the soothing waters:
among them Francesc Cambó (politician), Santiago Rusiñol
(painter), Josep Carner and Jacint Verdaguer (poets). His father started
another family business, ‘La Victoria’, which made piano rolls for pianolas and
exported them around the world. A crucial part of Blancafort’s musical
education seems to have been transferring music from notation to the rolls,
whatever that involves. (Has any other composer learned music in this way?) Many
of his compositions were, he said, the fruit of long solitary walks in the
mountain countryside around his home. Recognition
built up gradually, and was given a boost when ‘El Parc d’atraccions’ (1924)
was played in Paris by the piano virtuoso Ricard Viñes .
Paris was the centre of the musical world at this time, so
Blancafort naturally took in the world of impressionist sound (though he didn’t
actually live there, as Mompou did for large periods of his life). Other key
influences were Russian music and Iberia
by Albeniz. The Barcelona world was another matter: nowhere had the Wagner
phenomenon been stronger than in the Catalan capital, and in the Palau de la Música
we see the Wagnerian dream transformed into stone – architecture aspiring to
the condition of grand opera. Blancafort pronounced that ‘To get rid of Wagner
is, in my opinion, the first commandment of the new Catalan music … a few of us
in Catalonia would rather lean towards Paris than Berlin’. A group of Catalan
composers sympathetic to this idea was formally organized as the Associació de
Compositors Independents de Catalunya (CIC) in 1931 (Mopiu being a member). Another important cultural
context was Noucentisme, a cultural movement committed to a modern world based on classical purity and rational form, in
some ways in opposition to the historicism of Modernisme. A founding figure of
Nouncentisme was Eugeni d’Ors (1881-1954), who Blancafort had met in a cultural gathering
back at the spa.
As far as a brief glance at the life on Wikipedia and the
Blancafort Foundation site has revealed, hard times followed the closure of ‘La
Victoria’, and MB did various jobs. His name was really made in the 1930s and
later, and from the 1940s he concentrated on orchestral works. After the war
(the Spanish Civil War, that is) he moved to Sarrià in Barcelona.
I haven’t heard his
orchestral work yet, so can only report on the Cançons de Muntanya (UME). These are exquisite lyrical pieces , so simple
that you (or at any rate, I) have to play or listen to them a few times for the
contours to become clear. Mompou’s piano works, though quiet, have a more
immediate impact, like lines of poetry you instantly remember. Maybe they are
just stronger musical ideas, but then there are different kinds of strength,
different types of idea. Mompou loved the anonymity of the big city. Blancafort
comes more from the natural world: the first piece, ‘Cançó
del vent gronxant les branques’ (Song of the wind rocking the trees) gives a fair idea of his chief inspiration. The nine short pieces - album leaves, really - are clearly evocative of folk songs, though not I think based on any actual folk melodies. Mood is everything, as the simple directions (amb dolcesa, clar i vibrant) indicate. Anyway, the piano music has been recorded by Miguel Villalba for Naxos, which offers recordings of other works. If you’re in need of a spa break from Wagnerian romanticism, try this.Here is Andreiovitch Wudnitski playing Cançons de Muntanya on YouTube - a lovely rendering, I think.
del vent gronxant les branques’ (Song of the wind rocking the trees) gives a fair idea of his chief inspiration. The nine short pieces - album leaves, really - are clearly evocative of folk songs, though not I think based on any actual folk melodies. Mood is everything, as the simple directions (amb dolcesa, clar i vibrant) indicate. Anyway, the piano music has been recorded by Miguel Villalba for Naxos, which offers recordings of other works. If you’re in need of a spa break from Wagnerian romanticism, try this.Here is Andreiovitch Wudnitski playing Cançons de Muntanya on YouTube - a lovely rendering, I think.
(One picky point: 'Cançó de la tarda morint' means 'Song of the dying afternoon', not 'Song of an afternoon at sea'.)
NB In the course of doing this blog, I found the site La ma de Guido (ie the hand of Guido [de Arezzo]). Some useful info, and a source of orchestral parts for Catalan works. So just note it here for future ref.
