Survival Songs: Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror by Stephanie Anne Sieburth (review)

At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the bloodshed and terror was far from over as survivors dealt with ongoing disappearances, executions, torture, and morality police. In Survival Songs: Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror, Stephanie Sieburth contends that certain types of popular entertainment served as both a diversion and a coping mechanism for members of post-war generations that were often prohibited from publicly voicing their grief. As the monograph’s title reveals, Sieburth takes particular interest in the famed coplista Conchita Piquer and how the form, content, and performance of her songs served as tools to process the terror and grief of a generation stricken by the political and the emotional repression of the Francoist regime. Sieburth’s interdisciplinary lens focuses on how music may have served as psychotherapy for some citizens. She simultaneously attends to historical context and the textual content of six of Piquer’s tragic coplas.

The eight balanced chapters form a coherent background and analysis of the selected coplas, with the first two chapters dedicated to introductions, the middle five to specific songs, and the last to a brief conclusion. Chapter one describes the psychological backbone of Sieburth’s analysis and demonstrates that the environment in post-war Spain provided all of the necessary ingredients for the development of chronic symptoms of traumatic stress. Sieburth proposes that Hollywood and popular music allow “the defeated,” those who had fought for the Republican side during the war, to protect both their physical and psychological well-being by embodying roles that alternatively conformed and rebelled to strict normative roles. Chapter two delves into the appeal of the copla for opposing sides of Spanish society by evoking an image of Spain that appealed to right-wing sentiment, while also speaking from the point of view of the oppressed and isolated. The attention-grabbing archival photos included in the chapter evidence the stardom and charisma of Piquer, the genre’s standout performer.

Each of the next five chapters studies one copla, with one exception: chapter seven includes two. Sieburth marries the narrative aspects of each song’s lyrics, the formal qualities of their music, and the defining characteristics of their performance in order to describe how it may have provided an outlet for the expression of distinct emotional struggles.

Chapters three and four examine “La Parrala” and “Ojos verdes,” respectively. For a people looking to cover up controversial past political involvement, Sieburth argues that La Parrala’s denial of involvement with a dissident character would have paralleled their lived experience. By role-playing along with La Parrala through song and dance, the public could use this song “as a mechanism of desensitization to fear” (89). The second copla is evaluated as a ritual of separation from missing loved ones. Sieburth emphasizes that this song provides the audience with a contained space to mourn together through Piquer’s emotional performance. In these chapter and others, Sieburth’s reliable English translations open her analysis to readers who do not speak Spanish.

The study of “Tatuaje” in chapter five serves as the climax of this monograph, as it addresses perhaps the best-known copla of Sieburth’s selection. She uses it to discuss “complicated grief,” that is, per the definition this critic employs, a long-lasting and uncontrollable resurgence of potent mental images related to the life and loss of a loved one (125). Sieburth brings this “old” song up to date by comparing its longing for closure with that of contemporary members of the movement to recuperate la memoria histórica. When explicit evidence is unavailable to testify to the use of the copla in processes of grief, the author turns to recent documentaries (i.e. Els nens perduts del franquisme [2002]) to help develop her reading. In such instances, Sieburth’s interdisciplinary technique truly shines and shows how, when read together, music, film, and literature...