Federico Mompou: Música callada [Voices of Silence]

With his customary self-effacement, Pablo Picasso once affirmed: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”. While it is a matter of debate for art critics whether Picasso could really paint like Raphael, it is a deep truth that the absolute simplicity of childhood is but rarely reached by adults, and only at the price of a long itinerary of asceticism and purification.
There are some masterpieces in the keyboard literature which achieve this unearthly whiteness; not by chance, these pieces are frequently perceived as transcendent, as deeply spiritual, as heavenly. The Christian tradition maintains that God is absolutely simple; thus, to strive for simplicity is to be in quest of a divine quality. One thinks, for example, of Bach’s Aria from the Goldberg Variations (especially in its da capo reappearance after the cycle’s itinerary); of Beethoven’s Arietta from Sonata op. 111; of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige. When a composer manages to realize a masterpiece by using very few notes, this is a clear sign that he or she knows which notes really matter, and how to fill them with meaning. In their very different styles, Bach, Beethoven and Debussy knew perfectly well how to handle oceans of notes; yet, some of their most perfect works are realized with an impressive economy of means. This ideal seems to inspire the aesthetics and creativity of Federico Mompou’s entire itinerary as a musician, throughout his long and productive life.
Indeed, he was not alone, among the composers of the twentieth century, in seeking perfection in small-scale works and in the rejection of redundance and opulence. Yet, his aesthetical choices were also very different from those of the musicians who seemingly adopted a similar outlook. Different from Webern, for example, who also favoured the aphoristic style, Mompou did not embrace strict serialism, and preferred to maintain a clear, though free, connection with the tonal world. Different from pointillists such as Erik Satie, Mompou chose to renounce magniloquence without ridiculing or satirizing it. Different from the mainstream minimalists, his quest for a “minimal” style did not express a nihilistic attitude, nor did it mirror almost hallucinatory patterns.
Mompou’s world, by way of contrast, seems to be constantly inhabited by this childlike (but never childish or puerile) attitude; one is tempted to say that this composer did not have to strive for it in the same fashion as Picasso did.
Federico Mompou was born in Barcelona, Catalunya, on April 16th, 1893, in a family rich in artistic talent. His mother was French-born, and her parents were famous bell-makers; thus, Federico’s education took place in an environment marked by both religious piety and music. This tradition was deeply rooted in the family; the Dencausse bells had been famous for no less than five centuries, and some of their best “instruments” could be heard from the Notre Dame and Montmartre cathedrals of Paris.
While one of Mompou’s siblings became a famous painter (indeed, one of his drawings was reproduced on all of Mompou’s compositions published in France), Federico demonstrated his gifts as a musician, and received his education at the Conservatory of Barcelona. He gave his first public performance at the age of 15, but soon it became clear that his quiet and shy personality was not ideally suited for a virtuoso career as a pianist.
One year later, Mompou was deeply impressed upon hearing the French composer and pianist Gabriel Fauré playing his own Quintet op. 59; this event on the one hand inspired the young musician to pursue his composition studies, on the other slightly discouraged him from embarking on an activity as a concert musician.
However, Mompou decided to perfect his skills as a pianist under the guidance of Isidor Philipp, one of the greatest pianists of the era, who taught him in Paris; at the same time, Mompou continued his musical education under Ferdinand Motte Lacroix and Marcel Samuel Rousseau. The following years were spent between Barcelona (where he sought refuge from the impending war) and Paris (where he returned in 1921, residing in the French capital for some twenty years); gradually, Mompou acquired substantial fame as a composer, and obtained important honours from both the French and the Catalonian governments.
Eventually, he settled in Barcelona, where he remained for the rest of his long life, and where he became one of the most respected and admired musicians of the second half of the twentieth century. These two geographical and cultural poles, i.e. Paris and Barcelona, represent thus not only the places where Mompou spent most of his life, but also the two main sources of his artistic inspiration.
He had arrived in Paris as a piano student in the same year when Debussy had published his Préludes for the piano; he had lived in, and loved deeply his Catalunya. From Paris he had acquired an extraordinary artistic refinement and an exquisite taste for the dynamic, timbral and tonal nuances. From Barcelona and Catalunya, he had learnt how folk tunes, in their seeming naivety, may express the deep wisdom of the people, and also the simple and sincere faith which the French metropolis frequently seemed to have lost.
These elements seem to converge in his piano masterpiece, Música callada, recorded here in its entirety. This long and impressive suite was written between 1959 and 1967, and represents the summit of Mompou’s art and of his creative perspective. It is divided into four albums (1959, 1962, 1965 and 1967), and includes twenty-eight pieces of variable length. All of them, however, are concise, and their average duration is two minutes. These pieces demonstrate, among others, the vastity of Mompou’s literary and artistic interests, displaying quotes and epigraphs excerpted from works by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Josep Janes, Paul Valery and Tomas Garcés. Above all, however, the main source of inspiration for the whole cycle (and possibly also for other of Mompou’s works) is the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross, the Carmelite poet and reformer who experienced the sacred as a revelation to be pursued in the darkness and solitude of the soul. St. John of the Cross wrote memorable lines, which, at first sight, may strike today’s readers as almost nihilistic in content; the “nada”, the “Nothing” is frequently evoked, though in a fashion which is simply the contrary of today’s nihilism. St. John believed that the mystery of God is unattainable by human beings as long as “the world”, i.e. evil, sin and egoism, possess them; thus, the itinerary leading to God must pass from a total spoliation.
St. John’s lines, chosen by Mompou, are striking: “The tranquil night / At the approaches of the dawn, / The silent music, / The murmuring solitude, / The supper which revives, and enkindles love”. This “silent music” (música callada in Spanish) is what inspired Mompou. He understood St. John’s lines not as oxymora, but as true experiences: the summit of music is silence, in a solitude which is inhabited by a soft murmur. Speaking of this cycle, Mompou affirmed: “this music has no air or light. It is a weak heartbeat, you cannot ask it to reach more than a few inches into space, but its mission is to reach the profound depths of our soul and the secret regions of our spirit’s spirit. This music is quiet (callada) because one listens to it within. Contained and reserved. Its emotion is secret and only becomes sound from resonance under the cold cape of our society. It is my desire that this music should bring us closer to the warmth of life, and the expression of the human heart, that is always the same and constantly changing”. For Mompou, St. John had found “a music which is the very voice of silence”; this “muted music” allowed solitude itself to become music. He was in quest of a music which could be heard intimately, inside one’s soul, with restrain and pudor; “its emotion is secret, and it takes no aural form except through its resonances inside the coldness of our loneliness”. Thus, the cycle opens with Angelico, “a music of angels”, “the music of the first sonorous Solitude, dreamily gliding between earth and heaven”. The sounds of mysticism, however, are not found only in the quiet and serene atmosphere of this first piece; for instance, the fifth (Legato metallico) represents the sacred through the sounds of bells. It is, in Mompou’s words, “a far bell articulating its obsessive notes”, which “seems to come from another world”. Angels, solitude and bells are found also in the eighth piece, Semplice, where the heavenly music “fluctuates and vibrates and slowly rises from the depths to the heights”. Mompou thus achieves an almost miraculous artistic feat: this cycle is organic and consistent although it was composed over eight years; it is deeply spiritual without becoming “fleshless”, as T. S. Eliot would have put it; it is inhabited by an intensely mystical mood without losing touch with the variety and fantasy which enlivens the artistic creation. Bells, angels, solitude, but also folksong, traditional tunes, diverse atmospheres and a rich palette of colours contribute, together, to the creation of a vast fresco made of miniatures, of a true mosaic composed of shining tiles.

Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio