Falla's Last Dream

For the last 20 years of his life, Spanish Composer Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) seemed to have deserted music. In Granada, and later in Argentina, he passed his time in apparently unproductive solitude. But Falla never stopped working, and the years of silence were filled with a dream--"to glorify the immortality of Spain through music." Last week, at Milan's La Scala, the grand dream came to life at the premiere of Falla's four-hour-long scenic cantata La Atlantida.

Falla conceived of La Atlantida as his life's masterwork. a Spanish Parsifal, throbbing with epic Wagnerian themes and massive Wagnerian thunder. He took his title and story from the Catalonian epic by Jacinto Verdaguer--a tale of the lost continent of Atlantis, destroyed for its sins, and of Spain preserved to export Christianity to the New World.

Ping, Pang, Pong. The old. unhappy exile spun out his cantata in 29 scenes, but at his death, most of the orchestration was still incomplete; the rough score entrusted to his sister Maria contained as many as six alternate versions of some scenes. The job of selecting the best versions and of stitching the whole thing together was taken over by Spanish Composer Ernesto Halffter, a onetime pupil. Halffter was confident that he could remain true to the master's "musical tastes and ascetic conceptions."

He did. At La Scala, under the baton of U.S. Conductor Thomas Schippers, La Atlantida proved to be a grandiose but admirably controlled work that made its points with much of the concision that Falla displayed in such earlier compositions as The Three-Cornered Hat. Where Falla departed from his familiar style was in the sparing use of folk material and in the skillful use of a descriptive chorus. Atlantida has only three major singing roles: Narrator Corifeo (Baritone Lino Puglisi), Queen Pyrene (Mezzo Giulietta Simionato), and Queen Isabella (Soprano Teresa Stratas). Much of the action is either pantomime or dancing.

The cantata introduces an old man, the Spirit of the Sea, who relates the story of the sinking of Atlantis to a young man named Christopher Columbus. The story winds through the wanderings of Hercules, his destruction of the three-headed monster Geryones, and finally ends with the vision of Columbus--with alleluias of thanksgiving for the land he will soon discover. Completely tonal, full of color and exciting contrasts, the heroic score was never overwhelming, always deft in its handling of a myriad of descriptive effects. And the weightiness of the theme was relieved by occasional touches of humor, most strikingly with the singing of the three-headed Geryones (Tenors Pier Francesco Poli, Pieo de Palma, Sergio Pezzetti), which sounded a little like Tnrandot's Ping. Pang and Pong in flamenco.

Muscles & Washboard. The La Scala gallery found itself a new hero in the actor who mimed the role of Hercules--U.S.-born Roger Browne, whose normal occupation is playing muscle-bound heroes in grade-B Italian movies. (Said he: "This opera business is great and not such hot work as filming.") Although the premiere was not, as Director Margherita Wallmann claimed, "the greatest musical event since Berg's Wozzeck," it marked an important addition to the comparatively small body of Falla's work. Conductor Schippers spoke for most of the audience when he hailed Atlantida as "the triumph of real music over washboard twelve-tone."

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