Eduardo Sainz de la Maza: Guitar Works

Eduardo Sainz de la Maza

Eduardo Sainz de la Maza’s music asks us to listen closely to what happens around a melody. The guitar carries the line while allowing the sounds around it an expressive life of their own, so that intimacy arises from the relationships within the musical texture. Across the original works and arrangements on this recording, the instrument becomes a meeting place for different musical experiences, absorbed into an unusually attentive conception of sound.

Born in Burgos in 1903, Eduardo belonged to a family whose name became internationally associated with his elder brother Regino. Regino’s advocacy of new concertos enlarged the guitar’s public presence, extending well beyond his association with Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. Eduardo’s contribution developed through composition and teaching, largely in Barcelona. His experience included professional work as a cellist and in dance music. Alongside his studies with Enric Morera, he found further harmonic models in Debussy and Ravel, and acknowledged the place of jazz in his musical life. These interests converged in a language whose tonal bearings remain audible even when added notes complicate a chord’s colour.

Eduardo encouraged his pupils to listen widely, including to chamber and orchestral music. His own writing asks the guitarist to attend to the internal balance of a sonority, allowing a clear melody to coexist with accompanying voices that retain a measure of independence.

Confidencia establishes this intimacy at the beginning of the programme. An introduction in 9/8 gives way to a gently rocking 6/8, with the melodic line supported by compact chords and reiterated bass notes. The change of metre settles the music into a more regular motion, as though an initially tentative utterance had found its natural pace. Its title suggests something entrusted to another person, and the relationship between a singing voice and a steady accompaniment allows that suggestion to become an experience of listening.

In Habanera, rhythmic familiarity is inseparable from the colour of the instrument. The two lowest strings are tuned down to D and G, widening the possibilities of bass resonance, while harmonics lend the opening a distinctive lightness. The habanera itself carries a history of movement between Cuba and Europe, taking different forms within the musical imaginations of Spain and France. Eduardo’s setting belongs to this exchange, with a recognisable dance rhythm supporting an individual harmonic sensibility. Its pulse provides continuity through changes of colour: the body remembers the dance while the ear follows the shifting sound.

Rondalla, composed in 1933, gives dance a vigorous physical presence. Its quick 3/8 opens into a broader 3/4 central section; the slower manner returns in the coda before a decisive final accent. The changes of pace give lyrical expansion a place within the work’s exuberance. Preludio makes the flexibility of musical time part of its harmonic language. Bars in 12/8, 9/8 and 6/8 allow phrases to expand and contract, while the opening gesture recurs across the piece. Sustained chords support brief chromatic movements, so that resonance and motion become interdependent. The ear recognises returning material even as the measure of its unfolding changes.

Homenaje a Toulouse-Lautrec opens another path from an external reference into musical form. Its waltz moves towards a freer central passage before returning to the opening material. The tribute to a painter invites us to consider how character can be conveyed through a passing gesture, without requiring the music to illustrate a particular canvas. The dance supplies a social presence, while its interruptions make room for reflection. Evocación criolla similarly allows a more rhythmically pointed central section to emerge within a flowing texture.

The arrangements extend this attention to melodic identity. Greensleeves brings an English tune into a programme whose Catalan songs include the lullaby El noi de la mare and Cançó del lladre, a robber’s song. Fum-fum-fum and Franz Xaver Gruber’s Stille Nacht recall the familiarity of Christmas music. Eduardo made these two settings as gifts for his pupil Teresa Pont. In Fum-fum-fum, independent bass movement and chromatic inner notes surround the tune; Stille Nacht becomes a barcarolle, its melody carried within a richly voiced texture. Familiarity makes the individuality of the harmonisation particularly audible. As words withdraw, phrasing and the distribution of voices assume their expressive burden. Edward MacDowell’s To a Wild Rose, originally the opening piano piece of Woodland Sketches, op. 51, brings a composed miniature into this company of songs.

Homenaje a la guitarra gives the instrument itself the place previously occupied by a painter or a remembered song. Awarded second prize in the 1961 Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française competition, it begins and ends with chordal harmonics, enclosing passages in which melody and arpeggiation explore a fuller range of the guitar’s voice. The return to those opening sonorities draws attention to resonance as part of musical expression. This concern prepares the ear for the sustained relationship between character and sonority in Platero y yo.

Completed as a suite in 1968, Platero y yo draws eight movements from Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose book about the small donkey and the world they share. The episodes turn everyday encounters into occasions for an exact, often painful awareness of life. Affection for an animal opens onto the vulnerability of other creatures and people, and the narrator’s pleasure in the landscape coexists with an acute consciousness of loss. Eduardo’s sequence achieves this through changes of pace, texture and harmonic light, and through a return that binds the ending to the beginning.

The first movement, Platero, presents its principal melody after an introductory passage. The shift between D minor and D major gives the portrait an expressive breadth which the tenderness of the subject can easily lead us to underestimate. Platero is alive within a changing world, and the music permits brightness and shade to belong to the same presence. The main theme will later become the means by which that presence can be recognised after its loss. Its initial appearance therefore establishes something whose full significance becomes clear only towards the end of the suite.

El loco concerns the narrator himself, mocked by children as he passes. The repeated figure high in the guitar’s register suggests the insistence of their calls, and the closing morendo allows the disturbance to recede. La azotea changes the point of view. From the roof terrace, the poet gathers sounds and movements dispersed across the town and landscape; the elevated position creates a field of perception in which separate lives can be apprehended together. The movement’s melodic writing allows this scene a singing continuity, sustaining the suite’s passage between sharply drawn character and a broader experience of place.

Darbón brings the relationship between outward appearance and inward feeling into especially close focus. Jiménez’s physically imposing veterinarian is capable of a tenderness which turns to grief when he remembers his dead daughter. The music’s forceful opening and subsequent gentler writing follow these changes of character, giving the portrait a psychological depth within a brief span. Each new gesture revises an earlier impression, requiring us to hold the man’s imposing physical presence and his vulnerability within the same portrait.

Paseo restores forward movement, its flowing figuration carrying the companionship of poet and donkey into the landscape. In La tortuga, the sense of time is altered again. Comparatively stable harmony allows small rhythmic changes to acquire an unusual prominence, making persistence itself audible. Jiménez’s tortoise disappears and returns across the years; its survival introduces a scale of duration exceeding that of a single encounter. Heard in sequence, these movements give movement and stillness a place within the same inhabited world, preparing for the more profound interruption which follows.

In La muerte, the return of Platero’s principal theme makes the suite’s deepest connection audible. A melodic identity first heard in the opening portrait reappears with altered harmonic support, so that recognition is inseparable from change. The musical material can return, although the creature whose presence it evoked has died. This creates a precise relationship between form and the experience of mourning: what has been lost remains available to the mind with a force that its absence has transformed. The passage gathers the preceding episodes into a history, allowing their apparently separate moments to be heard as parts of a shared life.

The suite continues beyond that death. A Platero en su tierra addresses the absent companion, drawing on Jiménez’s final act of remembrance. Its animated outer sections frame a more inward cantabile passage, and the recovery of movement gives the ending an affirmative energy. The act of address sustains a relationship across absence. Through the sequence as a whole, the guitar has acquired the capacity to carry both a character and the consciousness that remembers him, while a recurring melody provides the connection between them.

Giuseppe Mangia performs on an Enrique García guitar built in 1919, formerly owned by Renata Tarragó and now in Lorenzo Frignani’s collection. This instrument brings a material history to music so concerned with the possibilities of a single voice. Eduardo’s writing places considerable trust in that voice: a change within a chord, the return of a melody, or the duration of a fading sound can disclose an experience whose scale is much larger than the gesture that contains it.