La Caramba
José Castel (1737-1807)
Allegro, from Sinfonia No.3
Anonymous
La Caramba (1776)
Pablo Esteve (c.1730-1794)
Los duendecillos (1782)
José de Nebra (1702-1768)
Overture, Iphegenia en Tracia (1747)
José Castel
El arrendador del sebo
Bernarda Alvarez Acero
Fandango
Pablo Esteve
Los murmurados (1779)
Maria Hinojosa (soprano), Forma Antiqua/Aarón Zapico
rec. 2022, Colmenar Viejo, Spain
Spanish texts and English translations included
Winter & Winter 910 289-2 [60]
Listened to straight from the CD case, as it were, this is an enjoyable disc, full of vibrant musical colours (both vocal and instrumental) and exciting rhythms. I was immediately struck by the irresistible performance of Bernardo Álvarez Acero’s ‘Fandango’, the verbal and musical wit of Los murmurados by Pablo Esteve and the very accomplished overture to José de Nebra’s Iphegenia en Tracia. The singing of soprano Mario Hinojosa and the playing of the ensemble Forma Antiqua (made up of 5 violins, 2 cellos, 1 double bass, 2 horns, 2 oboes, harpsichord, baroque guitar, theorbo and percussion) are delightful throughout. The disc celebrates some of the music associated with one of the most famous singers of eighteenth-century Spain; but there is a dimension to it which isn’t obvious to an ‘innocent’ listener. What that additional level of meaning might involve is pointed to in the booklet essays by Juan Carlos Garvayo (especially) and Professor Nieves Pascal León, to which I am much indebted, though I have added to it, in what follows, by some rudimentary research of my own.
‘La Caramba’ was the nickname given to Maria Antonia Vallejo Fernández (1751-1787), a larger-than-life singer and actress who starred in the developing genre of the tonadilla, a short comedy (often satiric), with music (see Elizabeth Guin, The Tonadilla in performance: lyric comedy in enlightenment Spain, Berkeley, 2014). ‘La Caramba’ was a vibrant and commanding stage presence, who flirted with her audience. Women imitated her clothes, hairstyle and accessories, and she was the subject of wide discussion. She was, in effect, a celebrity in the modern sense of that word, though with more talent than many of those now called celebrities. She seems to have had numerous love affairs and certainly behaved in ways which justified her nickname, which makes a female name from the expression caramba, which can express a range of startled emotions, including wonder and excitement. Her charismatic personality and her extra-theatrical scandals inevitably startled her contemporaries. She was born in Motril, a town on the Mediterranean coast of Andalucia and seems to have brought characteristically Andalucian passion and intensity to how she lived and performed. However, in 1785, her theatrical career ended abruptly. Reportedly much affected when she heard a sermon by the Capuchin Friar Diego José de Cadíz (who preached extensively across Andalucia in the last decades of the eighteenth century) with a fitting sense of the dramatic she abandoned the stage and her loose life for a life of prayer and penitence. She died only two years after this spectacular change of life, in June 1787.
Anyone who shares my interest in Spanish music and musicians will probably recognise the name Juan Carlos Garvayo. He is best known as the pianist of that fine ensemble Trio Arbos. I didn’t know, until I consulted the entry on Garvayo on the Spanish edition of Wikipedia, that he is also a composer and a poet and that he, too, was born in Motril. Here, he contributes an essay to the booklet accompanying this disc, under the title ‘Los Pecados de María Antonia’ (The Sins of María Antonia). In it he juxtaposes Maria Antonia Vallejo Fernández with a near contemporary also born in Motril.
This was Luis Antonio Bellugay Moncada (1662-1743) who was ordained in his teens and subsequently had a successful career as a churchman, culminating in his appointment as a Cardinal in 1710. In the words of Juan Carlos Garvayo he “regarded theatre, music, dance and above all, women as the devil’s tools”. By a nice irony, only a few years after his death Motril saw the birth of the woman who came to be known as ‘La Caramba’, a woman who the Cardinal would surely have identified as the embodiment of all that he despised and feared. Belluga was much respected by the authorities of Motril, who put up a statue in his honour, whereas, to quote Garvayo again, there was “only a street and a well-known breakfast bar bearing [La Caramba’s] name” in Motril. But history’s ironies were not over. The statue of the Cardinal was moved at least once, and for some years faced the town’s Teatro Calderón de la Barca. Garvayo explains what happened in 2019: “the head of Cardinal Belluga fell and rolled along the floor. The stern, skull-capped, sculpted head of the moralist from Motril could not bear to face the Teatro Calderón de la Barca in æternum, and so detached itself from the rest of his body”.
We have here, then, a vivid tale of that centuries-long conflict between religious moralists and the theatre. The particular story told above is full of ironies: a sermon persuades a notorious actress to abandon her stage career; many years later, a provincial theatre (in Motril) metaphorically beheads one of the Spanish church’s fiercest critics of the theatre.
Dipping into Cardinal Belluga’s writings on the subject, I was struck by how similar some of his objections were to the complaints against the theatre made by sixteenth- and seventeenth- century English puritans: both found incitements to promiscuity, and sometimes to homosexuality in the theatre, and believed that many plays encouraged deceitfulness. Christian denunciation of the theatre goes back at least to Tertullian and Augustine in the early centuries of the faith. Both the Cardinal and his Puritanical predecessors saw in the attendance at plays a kind of blasphemous counter-religion. One Puritan, William Prynne, wrote that “Stage plays are the Devil’s own peculiar pomps” – a sentiment Cardinal Belluga unknowingly endorsed in his own writings. However, not all of those who had power in Spain’s Church in the eighteenth century shared this attitude, and composers often served (and were paid by) both church and stage. This was the case where at least one of the composers represented on this disc was concerned – José de Nebra; he was principal organist of the Spanish royal chapel and at the Convent of Las Descalzes Reales in Madrid, from 1724 until at least 1751. Yet between 1723 and 1751 he also wrote the music for more than fifty stage works performed in Madrid and elsewhere.
The music on this disc is, naturally, more concerned with the liveliness of the comic stage than with the rigour of the church’s criticism of theatre itself. Let us take, for example, this passage from a copla (a type of popular sung poem, often improvised, of having the air of being improvised) in José Castel’s El arrendador del sebo. I quote from the translation provided in the CD’s booklet:
The other evening I was coming
along Calle Toledo
donning shawl and skirt
worthy of a gaze.
He came by wrapped in a cape
a man so doll-like,
chubby, round, knock-kneed
and twisted-knecked.
Of these figures
hundreds come to be obstacles
with every step.
He came up to me and said:
Goodbye, entertaining one!
And I said:
“Bravo, money!”
Hands on hips,
grasping his body,
I alternated
his movements.
The informality and the direct address to the audience (more like a stand-up comedian’s routine than part of a comic opera) would no doubt have been relished by La Caramba, famous for the way she interacted with her audience. The stress on her choice to wear clothes “worthy of a gaze” tallies with her reputation, on and off-stage, for dressing in ways that attracted attention and set fashions. She would surely have made the most of the physical behaviour alluded to in the last four lines quoted.
To ask Maria Hinojosa – or, indeed, any singer – to recreate the magic of a predecessor about whom we have no audio, let alone video, evidence and who made her reputation performing in a musical-theatrical genre now extinct, is effectively to ask the impossible. Even if I cannot therefore claim that Maria Hinojosa fully ‘re-creates’ La Caramba (how could anyone now alive know whether she does or not?), I feel justified in saying, that on the basis of what I have read of what was written about La Caramba by her contemporaries, I feel confident that she and Forma Antiqua have paid a substantial and persuasive tribute to La Caramba.
The project that lies behind this recording was originally undertaken to create a performance at the 2020 Festival Música Sur de Motril and the result was subsequently given at several Spanish music festivals (snippets of a number of these performances can be found on YouTube).
In the first paragraph of this review, I nominated three works as ‘highlights’ of this disc. Now that I am better informed about the historical and cultural context of the music and about the remarkable woman known as ‘La Caramba’, I find the rest of the disc just as pleasurable and satisfying as those ‘highlights’.
Glyn Pursglove
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