Manuel de Falla
“El sombrero de tres picos” (The Three-Cornered Hat), ballet music Manuel de Falla “El sombrero de tres picos” (The Three-Cornered Hat), ballet music

A prize for his opera La vida breve first brought the 28-year-old Manuel de Falla wider attention in 1905. Yet it was not performed. To set his career in motion, the son of a merchant and a pianist, born in Cádiz in Andalusia, moved to the musical capital of Paris in 1907. There, a vogue for Spain was flourishing – nurtured after Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen by French composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Emmanuel Chabrier. In Paris, de Falla absorbed impulses from impressionist music and in doing so created his own distinctive orchestral palette of colours. He also broadened his horizons through frequent visits to the theatre. One experience left a particularly strong impression: a performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Paris Opéra, organised in 1908 by Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes. De Falla’s time in Paris also led him to his true vocation: to give authentic Spanish music a home in the world’s concert halls.

With these impulses and impressions, de Falla returned to Madrid in 1914. Here he was introduced in 1916 by Igor Stravinsky to Sergei Diaghilev during a Ballets Russes tour. The impresario took an interest in de Falla’s pantomime then in progress, El corregidor y la molinera (“The Corregidor and the Miller’s Wife”), based on a story by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the most famous Spanish writer of short fiction of the 19th century. The title of Alarcón’s novella was El sombrero de tres picos (“The Three-Cornered Hat”). De Falla’s pantomime was premiered in Madrid in 1917. On Diaghilev’s commission, he reworked the music for the Ballets Russes into a full-length piece now titled The Three-Cornered Hat, which made the composer famous across Europe. The ballet premiered in London in July 1919 under Ernest Ansermet, choreographed by Léonide Massine, who also danced the Miller. Costumes, sets, and curtain were designed by Pablo Picasso. In preparation, de Falla had accompanied Massine and Diaghilev to dance performances in various Spanish cities. It was on this trip that they noticed the young flamenco dancer Félix Fernández Garciá, who joined the Ballets Russes and was sketched by Picasso during rehearsals.

The eponymous headgear is worn by the corregidor – a Spanish mayor and village magistrate – as a sign of his office. This most important person in the village has fallen in love with the pretty miller’s wife, who has no intention of responding to the advances of the older dignitary and thereby betraying her beloved, though extremely jealous, miller. Instead of ending up in the miller’s wife’s bed, the corregidor – three-cornered hat and all – lands in the millstream, and authority once again becomes the laughing-stock of the village. The miller and his wife celebrate their reconciliation, and the villagers chase the corregidor away.

Spanish – and specifically Andalusian – dances, rhythms, and motifs shape almost every bar of the score of The Three-Cornered Hat. The “Dance of the Neighbours” is based on a seguidilla, a traditional dance in 3/4 time; the proudly strutting “Dance of the Miller” on a flamenco-like farruca. The triumphant jota is a high-spirited dance from Aragón in triple metre. This movement in particular demonstrates de Falla’s mature mastery of orchestration, for the score is far more difficult to play than the Spanish composer’s earlier works. In surging percussion accents – a bow to Stravinsky’s The Firebird – fanfare-like brass entries, and chains of string trills, an orchestra can put its brilliance on display.