‘A Light in the Darkness’ Review: The Song of Joaquín Rodrigo
Though seductive and beautiful in itself, the composer’s work reached new listeners with the help of Miles Davis.
By
Tim Page
May 3, 2024 11:28 am ET
A Light in the Darkness: The Music and Life of Joaquín Rodrigo
By Javier Suárez-Pajares and Walter Aaron Clark
W. W. Norton & Company
512 pages
Several mid-20th-century composers, though prolific, are remembered mostly for a single piece of music. Think of Carl Orff and his “Carmina Burana” or Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite.” And, certainly, think of the Spanish composer Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-99) and his enduringly popular work for guitar and orchestra, “Concierto de Aranjuez.”
Rodrigo wrote a lot of music in his 98 years. He created choral pieces, songs, works for large orchestra and concertos of various size for violin, cello, harp, flute and piano. (Rodrigo’s own principal instrument was the piano, by the way: He was never more than a passable guitarist.) Now two far-flung professors of musicology—Javier Suárez-Pajares at the Complutense University of Madrid and Walter Aaron Clark at the University of California, Riverside—have collaborated on the first major biography of the composer in English.
“A Light in the Darkness: The Music and Life of Joaquín Rodrigo” is more successful as a thorough and thoughtful chronicle of the composer’s work than as an engrossing tale. Recent musical biographies of Sibelius, Barber and Vaughan Williams, among others, have separated person from production, offering a chapter of life story followed by a chapter devoted to the works from the period, a helpful sort of division that offers a double path for the general reader.
In “A Light in the Darkness,” however, a paragraph or a page may be devoted to Rodrigo’s life, and then there may be long passages of musical analysis, some of it quite technical. The book is all well worth reading—there has never been and may never be another English-language book that tells us so much about the composer—but readers who are not adept at score reading may find themselves skimming here and there to catch up with the narrative.
The story is remarkable. Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, a city on the eastern shore of Spain, just outside the city of Valencia. He lost his sight almost entirely after a case of diphtheria when he was 3 years old, although he was able to distinguish light from darkness and recognize the presence of large objects until he was in his 40s. According to the authors, “being blind affected every aspect of Rodrigo’s life and brought him closer to music through an acute aural sense.” He learned to read and write music through an elaborate system based on Braille, one that arranged the raised-dots matrix into 256 encodings instead of the now standard 64.
He moved to Paris to study with Paul Dukas—another fine composer remembered almost entirely for one piece, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—and published the “Suite para piano” in 1923. The authors consider the suite “an auspicious and somewhat surprising debut” from the 22-year-old man and note that the movements “already bear the stamp of Rodrigo’s distinctive musical personality, as well as a non-Spanish character that might perplex those familiar only with his more popular works.” In the next several years, he moved back and forth between Spain and France, but the best-known evocation of Spain in the 20th century was written entirely in Paris.
Messrs. Suárez-Pajares and Clark rightly devote a long chapter to the “Concierto de Aranjuez,” which they call “the key with which Rodrigo opened the door to the history of music and walked through it.” It was not the first concerto for guitar and orchestra: Arrangements of works for lute and mandolin by Boccherini and Vivaldi had preceded it. But those works were played with small ensembles. Rodrigo worried that a full modern orchestra would drown out the soloist.
A paragraph from the program notes Rodrigo wrote for the first performance—on Nov. 9, 1940, in Barcelona—sums up his approach: “It would be unfair to ask that this concerto be powerful, and in vain would great sonorities be expected of it; that would be the same as falsifying its conception and bastardizing the instrument made of subtle vagueness. Its strength has been sought in its lightness and in the intensity of the contrasts.”
Mostly cheerful, always tuneful, the “Concierto” played off the sound of the full orchestra with the softer tones of a guitar, largely by couching the music in a sort of call-and-response dialogue. It was an immediate hit with guitarists. Yet the instrument was nowhere near as popular then as it is today—indeed, the Juilliard School had no guitar faculty until the 1980s—and it took an ingenious American jazz musician to make Rodrigo’s music famous through the world.
In 1959 the trumpeter Miles Davis attended a program of flamenco in New York. He was captivated by what he heard and bought all the albums of contemporary Spanish music that he could find. A friend then passed along the only recording of the “Concierto” to Davis, who was enraptured by its beauty. His favored arranger, Gil Evans, later recalled copying the music directly from the record because there was no published score available. By summer 1960, an album titled “Sketches of Spain” was released on Columbia and has never since been out of print. The first and by far the longest track on the record was Davis’s idiosyncratic vamp on the central Adagio from the “Concierto.”
Rodrigo had mixed feelings about such an adaptation and the forms the concerto eventually took after becoming so popular. So, too, do the authors. The original work “was a challenge to compose and a singular achievement, which attained renown in the halls of symphonic music for which it had been conceived,” they write. Still, “after becoming a widely recognized symbol of what was ‘Spanish,’ it ended up as a conventional musical ditty to sell luxury items like cars or perfumes and used in many film scores.”
True enough. Yet the unadorned “Concierto de Aranjuez” maintains its own distinctive poetry and power. May “A Light in the Darkness” lead new listeners to Rodrigo’s music and life.
