Whose Spain?: Negotiating “Spanish Music” in Paris, 1908–1929 by Samuel Llano (review)

In this thought-provoking study, Samuel Llano revisits, from a fresh viewpoint, the much-maligned tendency of French critics in the decades surrounding World War I to exoticize Spanish music. Llano establishes this new framework by building on the work of Hispanists such as Emilio Ros-Fábregas, the first scholar, to the best of my knowledge, who located the origins of the critical trope known as “Spanish mysticism,” which first surfaced in writings by August Wilhelm Ambros, but over which early-twentieth-century French critics such as Henri Collet enthused far more voluminously (Emilio Ros-Fábregas, “Historiografía de la música en las catedrales españolas: Positivismo y nacionalismo en la investigación musicológica,” Codex XXI 1 [1998]: 68–135). Llano also elaborates on the rift between so-called Teutonic and Latin aesthetics, an obsession among cultural spokespersons during that cataclysm some in France still call la Grand Guerre. In light of the centenary of the war, Llano’s research is as timely as his insights are welcome. His coverage of the postwar period also fills a lacuna in Spanish music scholarship while complementing, to some degree, pathbreaking studies such as Tamara Levitz’s microhistory of the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Perséphone (Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012]). For all these reasons, Whose Spain? received the Robert M. Stevenson Award in 2013, a prize conferred by the American Musicological Society for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music.

It is clear that some daunting challenges present themselves. Critics such as Collet were not only verbose but obscure in their effusions on Spanish music. (Joaquín Nin-Culmell, the composer and former student of Manuel de Falla, once rather generously described Collet to me as “an odd bird.”) Political and social subtexts and metaphors lurk at every turn, waiting to be unpacked. As Llano observes, one of Collet’s meanderings anticipates “the hybrid [racial] formulation of Spanish identity and history that historian Américo Castro would uphold, more famously and polemically, in his España y su historia (1948)—written in exile from the Franco dictatorship” (p. 28). The primary source materials Llano has painstakingly collected, with their frequent flights of bombast, are thus the backbone of his study, and discourse analysis, including translation, his primary tool.

There is much to admire about the ways in which Llano addresses these challenges. First, simply by approaching Spanish music from a French perspective, a new focus emerges. Refining the term “exoticism,” which “has become a catchword that masks a variety of practices and experiences” (p. xvii), the author provides a wealth of new factual information, discussing, for example, the Semaine espagnole of 1919 (p. 22) and Alexandre Bailly’s sets for the Paris production of Manuel de Falla’s La vie brève (La vida breve), which took place in January 1914 (pp. 141–42). The same can be said for the discussion of an homage to Falla held at the Opéra-Comique in 1928, an event that has been chronically misdated and thus overlooked. (The fact that the author and I differ on the feminist inclinations of the feisty female protagonist of El amor brujo, mentioned on p. 204, only reflects the richness of critical concepts in Falla’s oeuvre that remain to be pondered.) Indeed, if any scholar were to write a monograph on Falla’s relationship to France, Whose Spain? would serve as an apt point of departure, since Llano describes highlights of the composer’s experience at a level of detail impossible in more comprehensive life–work studies. One hopes Llano might take up this project himself someday.

Through the eyes of Collet and other hispanistes, Llano also enhances our understanding of Latinité in terms of Russian, French, and Spanish aesthetic sensibilities, which other scholars have discussed apropos the Ballets Russes (pp. 41–48). In...