Silvestre Revueltas en escena y en pantalla: La música de Silvestre Revueltas para el cine y la escena by Eduardo Contreras Soto, and: Contracanto: Una perspectiva semiótica de la obra temprana de Silvestre Revueltas by Roberto Kolb Neuhaus (review)

The compelling music, larger-than-life personality, and untimely death of Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) have over the past seven decades exerted a peculiar effect on his admirers. Within days of his death, the construction began of a powerful myth, one in which anecdotes abound, facts are scarce, problems and shortcomings are glossed over, evaluations are hagiographical, the pursuit of political agendas runs rampant, and Revueltas is frequently seen as an alter ego. In addition, many of Revueltas’s fans seem to believe that the best way to exalt him is to denigrate his contemporary Carlos Chávez (1899– 1978), or even, inversely, that the best way to denigrate Chávez is to use Revueltas for that purpose, a practice that adds a peculiar bias to the myth.

Nearly everything that has been written about Revueltas needs to be read with a healthy dose of skepticism, and even scholars have not entirely extricated themselves from “the Revueltas effect.” Their task has not been easy, though. The vagaries of the composer’s disorderly life and the fate of his estate after his death have left precious few documents; a small compositional output; manuscripts presenting conflicting versions; and poorly edited, posthumously published scores. Conjecture frequently gives way to speculation and even fiction.

In the larger context of the scholarship on Revueltas, the books under review here, though not completely exempt from hagiography, stand out. Both published in 2012, they complement each other thematically. Eduardo Contreras’s Silvestre Revueltas en escena y en pantalla is devoted to the composer’s music for film and stage, covering the years from 1933 to 1940; Roberto Kolb’s Contracanto focuses mostly on Revueltas’s symphonic and chamber music from 1929 to 1934. Both authors had previously contributed major works to scholarship on Revueltas: in 2000 Contreras published a biography of the composer (Canto, duelo y son), and Kolb is the compiler of Revueltas’s catalog of works and general editor of the ongoing critical edition of his works. This and a good number of program and liner notes, articles, and short books make these authors the leading scholars on the composer.

Revueltas wrote the music for seven feature films—Redes (1934– 35), ¡ Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1935), El indio (1938), La noche de los mayas (1939), El signo de la muerte (1939), Los de abajo (1939), and ¡Que viene mi marido! (1940)—and a government documentary on the construction of the railroad in Baja California. His incidental music for the theater includes “Velorio,” a section of a collective play for the government-sponsored, multiple-artist-authored ¡Upa y apa! (1939); two delightful pieces for children, Troka el poderoso and El renacuajo paseador (both 1933); and the unfinished ballet La coronela (1940). This list is not as clear cut as it seems, since we know of plays for which his incidental music is missing, and we have music for which the film or play no longer exists. Thus, there is disagreement among scholars as to the extent of Revueltas’s authentic oeuvre for film and stage. (Antonia Treibler-Vondrak’s Silvestre Revueltas Musik für Bühne und Film considers a slightly different list.¹) And then there is the question of the inauthentic oeuvre. Revueltas made concert suites only of Redes and the documentary film music, called Música para charlar, but conductors Erich Kleiber and José Yves Limantour made concert suites of Redes, La noche de los mayas, and other pieces, suites that often include fictive rather...