Avant-garde romantic

Grotesque fool­ish­ness

Juan Fran­cisco de Dios ex­plains that Bal­ada’s oeu­vre can be di­vided into three main stages. In the early pe­riod, from 1956-65, Bal­ada was “search­ing for his artis­tic iden­tity”. The music is mod­ernist and neo-clas­sic, with con­ven­tional har­monies and de­vel­op­ments. Though 12-tone music was then all the rage, Bal­ada did not like it. He was study­ing at the Juil­liard School in New York: “I won­dered: How can they waste all the new tech­niques on such grotesque fool­ish­ness?” Bal­ada de­ter­mined to use these tech­niques to com­pose with “rhythm, move­ment to some­thing of a cli­max, a kind of avant-garde ro­man­ti­cism.” His re­jec­tion, his bi­og­ra­pher sug­gests, of a closed sys­tem of music was in part a po­lit­i­cal re­ac­tion. Bal­ada had come to New York for free­dom, to es­cape the con­fines of the dic­ta­tor­ship.

Then, from about 1966 to 1975, Bal­ada ex­punged melodies to write “geo­met­ric” music. He con­cen­trated on “lines and tex­tures” in­stead of melody. Rhythm, how­ever, was al­ways pre­sent: he was never an ab­stract com­poser, un­like the ab­stract ex­pres­sion­ist paint­ing he saw around him and ad­mired. One of his first works in this pe­riod was his Guer­nica sym­phonic move­ment (1966), in­spired by Pi­casso’s paint­ing. An anti-Viet­nam War demon­stra­tion had re­called to mind his child­hood mem­o­ries of the Span­ish Civil War. A con­stant through­out Bal­ada’s life was this po­lit­i­cal com­mit­ment to the val­ues of his par­ents. That said, he also worked with a num­ber of un­savoury char­ac­ters, such as the Fran­coists Cela and Dalí. Ma­rina Sabina, his 1969 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Camilo José Cela, was the key work of this sec­ond pe­riod. The can­tata tells the story of a Mex­i­can shaman, pop­u­lar among the hip­pies of the time for her use of hal­lu­cino­genic mush­rooms. Her vil­lage de­mands she be hanged as a witch. It shared the fate of many great works by being booed at its 1970 Madrid pre­miere, though it had tri­umphed shortly be­fore in New York. Prob­a­bly, Bal­ada (who was con­duct­ing) thought, this was be­cause the Span­ish au­di­ence, un­like the Amer­i­cans, un­der­stood the words of Cela’s fe­ro­cious text.

Transat­lantic un­ortho­doxy

His third pe­riod dates from 1975. Main­tain­ing the pulse and geo­met­ric ideas of his sec­ond phase, he rein­tro­duced melody. This means that his work is more ac­ces­si­ble than that of many avant-garde com­posers. He tells sto­ries and uses phras­ing from Cata­lan folk-tunes. Among over 110 cat­a­logued works, his longest is the two-hour opera Christo­pher Colum­bus, which pre­miered in Barcelona’s Liceu in 1989 with Josep Car­reras and Montser­rat Ca­ballé.

The peo­ple he has known and worked with are a ros­ter of late twen­ti­eth-cen­tury art: Pi­casso, Segovia, Ali­cia Alonso, Victòria dels Àngels, Aaron Cop­land, Ros­tropovich, among oth­ers. He was close friends with the ex­iled poster artist Car­les Fontserè. On a visit to Lon­don he sought out the mae­stro Robert Ger­hard. At a sur­re­al­ist hap­pen­ing, Sal­vador Dalí hurled hard ob­jects at paint­ings po­si­tioned round the stage, while sev­eral small groups im­pro­vised on Bal­ada’s mu­si­cal phrases. The book gives the im­pres­sion of a buzzing Bal­ada, full of en­ergy: he was a so­cial being, at­tend­ing lec­tures, par­ties and art shows; he was po­lit­i­cally en­gaged; he wrote ar­ti­cles; he com­posed sev­eral works at once.

The bi­og­ra­phy’s style is cu­ri­ous, mod­elled per­haps on the un­ortho­dox rhythms of Bal­ada’s music. The prose is pre­cise and dense, but with vivid im­agery, baroque flour­ishes and un­usual word order. Here are two ex­am­ples.

“This hap­pened one morn­ing when an el­e­gant, elo­quent gen­tle­man with a fat wal­let walked into the brand-new Bal­ada tai­lor’s es­tab­lish­ment.” (p.55)

or

“The prospect of leav­ing Spain in the early fifties, when the coun­try was stuck in an eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion worse than under the Re­pub­lic, was as un­likely as fish­ing tuna out of a river.” (p.56)

Juan Fran­cisco de Dios’ com­plex style forces read­ers to con­cen­trate. I ad­mire how he strives to de­scribe and re­flect music in words – a fear­ful chal­lenge.

The arc of Bal­ada’s life is mov­ingly cap­tured by the bi­og­ra­phy. A child of de­feated, an­ar­chist Cat­alo­nia, he lived with lit­tle money or em­ploy­ment in New York be­fore be­com­ing fa­mous as a com­poser. The book ro­man­ti­cally but aptly de­scribes him as “an Amer­i­can from Barcelona with a transat­lantic heart and an Iber­ian soul” (p.284).