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Girona and
Napoleó
Plays by Rafael Compta and Carles Quilmetas.
Música Antiga de Girona (Ancient Music of Girona) will release
its second CD with unpublished compositions from the Cathedral Music Chapel,
which have been preserved in the chapter archive and date back to the
period of the Napoleonic sieges. Those are works that show the cultural
activity in Girona in 1800 and their evolution in the musical field, with
both classical and modern styles represented by Rafael Compta and Carles
Quilmetas.
Girona, placed among the French border and Barcelona, will suffer three
sieges in 1808 and 1809 which will entail the disappearance of half of
its inhabitants, material damage and the stay, for some years, of up to
4000 Frenchmen that were trying to control one of the main paths that
crossed Girona and which was very important to supply their troops fighting
in the peninsula. Resistance will bring destruction, material as well
as moral, and will deeply mark the future of the city until our days.
The cultural disorder brought about by the sieges will create a feeling
of emptiness in the cultured groups of the city. The opposition between
the people who supported the French and the ones who opposed them, that
is to say between the modern world and the old one, which military deeds
will stress, will also be found in comparing the work of two musicians
from Girona that we are introducing here: Carles Quilmetas, a violinist
and double bass player, and Rafael Compta, chapel master. Both musicians,
from a town called Vic, and with practically the same age, worked artistically
for the cathedral of Girona, but with quite different musical styles.
Carles Quilmetas (Vic 1756, Girona 1775-1834) the first permanent layman
of the cathedral chapel was a violinist and double bass player. An instrumentalist
virtuoso, he worked more than forty years for the cathedral, bearing the
hardness of the sieges and the French presence, a hard period that brought
hunger and made him beg the Chapter in order to be able to feed his family.
And little more is known about him. The original manuscript of this symphony
is kept at the Biblioteca de Catalunya (Catalunya Library) after Carrera
Dagas, chapel master between 1851 and 1890, sold it in 1900 to the Diputació
de Barcelona together with other remarkable scores from the archives of
the cathedral, concealing the origins in the catalogue that was published
afterwards.
At the end of the XVIIIth century the work of Haydn was very well-known
all over Europe thanks to the new musical spaces that the bourgeoisie
had created. In Catalonia, where the new bourgeois public was increasing,
this composer will have a remarkable impact while in the rest of the state
he did not arouse great interest as this process of modernization did
not rely on such institutions as the Church and nobility. The composers’
success had to be found among the new public, who would pay to be able
to enjoy these new compositions.
Symphonies were not only composed in Barcelona, but also in other towns
of Catalonia, where the new bourgeois public started to create its own
and diverse culture. Up to now, in Girona, we have been able to locate
four authors who dared compose that new music for that new audience. Carles
Quilmetas, Bernat Bertran, Josep Pons and Antoni Guiu composed symphonies,
following Haydn’s pattern, and thus it is not surprising that three
scores are preserved in the chapter archive . We do not know if Quilmetas’s
symphony was ever played in Girona. Was that music played in the cathedral
during canonical hours as it has usually been suggested? Was it played
in the Conservatory that the Dominicans had in Girona and where the master
Compta played an oratorio in 1803? We do not know it, as we do not know
when it was composed either. As a formal singularity it is necessary to
remark that this symphony only has three tempos, fast-slow-fast, and that
the first tempo is preceded by some slow times, Haydn’s style. The
minuet in the middle is characteristic of the gallant style. Its melodies
are refined and are joined with new elegance and freshness, a sign of
the new cultural stage that Girona symphonies symbolized at that time,
and which marked a contrast with Compta’s style, sounder and meant
for a much larger audience
Rafael Compta:
(Vic 1761, Girona 1794-1815) occupied the post of chapel master in 1794
in full Great War, after his brother resigned and despite having failed
his exams. Immediately he asked for a wage increase, which was granted
to him, in order to be able to earn his living and that of the four altar
boys from the choir that he was in charge of, as the prices had increased
because of the war. Three years later, however, he was penalized for not
having taken enough care of these altar boys, since they were badly clothed,
did not get enough food and they were not properly educated. Those were
the years when he was preparing to be ordained a priest. As a composer
he achieved remarkable prestige thanks to the fact that his compositions
did not break with the past and had certain distinction, and even some
of them were played in Madrid. His health must have been poor since more
than once he had to leave the city to recover. He died in August 1815,
while coming back to Girona from his native town Vic.
Provisionally we can say that his style is that of a composer who does
not venture into innovation and who keeps on using the former musical
resources with few changes, as for example in his scarce use of the viola.
Melodies are theatrical and popular at the same time. As a chapel master
he might have felt obliged to make a personal synthesis among the several
musical styles that he had known throughout his entire life.
“Saltando y brincando Villancico burlesco” was written at Christmas
1813, with the French living in the city. “Burlesco” was a type
of Christmas carol with many concessions to popular tastes and far from
the rigidity of liturgical texts. The lyrics are properly a dramatization
of a secondary aspect of the evangelic narration, which avoids any reference
to more significant themes. The surprising criticism to the doctors of
that time has to be understood as a sign of his illness, as he would die
months afterwards. In the text the shepherds, while walking, talk about
common subjects, such as food and drink, and besides one of the shepherds
is called Malvasia. These details refer to the deprivations he lived in
the city at a time of occupation and war. On arriving to the Cave they
offer the child some foods, but especially a bolero whose lyrics are against
the French invader. That dance was quite fashionable at the Bourbon court
and for this reason it is used by the composer to oppose the French style.
Compta created a remarkable piece while ridiculing “manfredines and
bolangeres” , foreign dances that some people danced in Girona. All
through the composition versification does not come in a natural way more
than once, as if the whole text had not been finished off. The lyrics
and dramatization are not too successful and the melody shows some Italian
influence and rustic quality. Over the years many dramatic elements will
be expelled from the cathedral and will be part of the Nativity Plays
(Pastorets).
Ferran VII’ Te Deum (1814): Ferran VII arrived in Girona on 24th
March 1814 on his way from Figueres and Valençay, where he had
been confined for six years. Ten days before, The French had left the
city. Ferran VII stayed in Girona for four days and a half, time enough
for politicians and soldiers to put pressure on the young king on a very
important subject: should the 1812 Constitution be abolished? He will
be dogged by this dilemma until the end of his life. His arrival in Girona
was spectacular: the royal coach needed more than one hour to go from
the Pont Major until Casa Carles, residence of the king, all the streets
being crowded. The following day the Chapter received him with that solemn
liturgical chant of thanksgiving, sung inside the cathedral with great
solemnity . Upon finishing the king climbed down the grand staircase,
a scene portrayed in the painting by Bonaventura Planella, a military
topographer there present, and that can be seen in the present edition.
The composition starts with a brief and peculiar orchestral introduction,
based on the well-known burlesque melody Napoleon had a hundred soldiers.
This melody is still very popular in Catalonia today, but curiously it
is not known in other places of the Iberian peninsula. It is sung suppressing
a syllable in each stanza, making reference to the fact that the young
farmers recruited by force by the Napoleonic troops when the army moved
forward across Europe, left the French army as soon as they could. It
is for this reason that the French sing it going from the 500 soldiers
of the first stanza to 400 of the second and thus each stanza diminishes
the amount of soldiers until zero. After this short introduction the orchestra
continues with the Latin text for four voices accompanied by first and
second violins, oboes, horns but without viola . The rhythm entails easily
perceivable military elements whose purpose we ignore. It is a solemn
composition that might have made people forget for some minutes the hardships
of the time after years of war and French occupation.
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