Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review

Between 1920 and 1936, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his friend and folk-music pupil    Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, wrote many of their best-known works, all affected by the other artist.  The many interconnections between them exceeded the printing space available to the author for his 2014 book on those links.  The present article puts those silenced finds into print for the first time.  Falla´s 1908 piece “Andaluza” attempts to express the soul of Andalusia by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and folk cadences of that southern Spanish region.  The work, together with others by Falla, inspires at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by Lorca: the two “Rider's Songs” from the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs and two short allegorical dialogues of 1925 gathered into Poema del Cante Jondo or Poem of Deep Song.  While all these analogies between Falla's music and Lorca´s poetry center around a variety of male Andalusian archetypes, still other likenesses between the two artists show up in Falla´s compositions examining feminine innocence and the two Lorca poems “Two Girls,” two studies on Andalusian woman's purity from Poem of Deep Song.