{"id":6696,"date":"2026-10-27T14:06:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T14:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accademiaclub.com\/album\/cantar-de-amor-2\/"},"modified":"2026-10-27T14:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T14:06:26","slug":"cantar-de-amor","status":"publish","type":"album","link":"https:\/\/accademiaclub.com\/en\/album\/cantar-de-amor\/","title":{"rendered":"Cantar de Amor"},"content":{"rendered":"

This content is exclusive to Accademia Club members.<\/p>Become a member<\/a>

Already a member? Log in<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Cantar de Amor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juan Hidalgo and his contemporaries at the court of Philip IV<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a well-known fact, and not an easy one to explain, that the arts flourished gloriously in 17th-century Spain, at a time of utter material and moral decline in the country. Perhaps that peak of painting, religious sculpture and architecture was itself a factor in the ruin, for what we would now call posturing<\/em> was well-known behaviour among the impoverished Spanish nobles, who squandered the gold of the Americas, whether it arrived or not, on pageantry, palaces, altarpieces and portraits \u2013 at least since the famous breadcrumbs in the beard of the hidalgo in El Busc\u00f3n (or rather in the Lazarillo, it hardly matters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music was no stranger to that dazzling glory. Although less well known than the likes of Guerrero and Morales (let alone Murillo or Vel\u00e1zquez), the Spanish composers of the early Baroque were respected in Europe for their quality and for the distinctiveness of their style, largely untouched by the all-pervading Italian influence. While trying to hold on to its distant frontiers in Naples, Portugal and the Americas, the most Catholic Habsburg monarchy closed its borders to heretical foreign influences, so its music became original by necessity, with no other sources to drink from than tradition and folklore. Spanish music thus kept and developed its own characteristics: almost exclusive instruments such as the guitar and the harp; unique harmonies; cross-rhythms between duple and triple time, very rarely felt elsewhere; its own forms, such as the villancico and the romance, or openly popular ones such as the j\u00e1cara and the seguidilla; and dances from across the seas later copied throughout half of Europe, such as the fol\u00edas, the chacona and the zarabanda\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dominant musical figure at the 17th-century Spanish court was undoubtedly Juan Hidalgo, the fourth centenary of whose birth we celebrated in 2014. He is the Spanish counterpart of Henry Purcell in England or Lully in France: together with the playwright Calder\u00f3n de la Barca, he tried to establish a Spanish operatic tradition along Italian lines. The ultimate goal failed for, as the Italian Baccio del Bianco warned as early as 1652 with regard to the Madrid court, \u201cthese gentlemen cannot get it into their heads that one can speak by singing\u201d; Calder\u00f3n himself acknowledged in La p\u00farpura de la rosa<\/em> (1659) that the Spanish would not tolerate an action that was \u201call music\u201d. But the attempt proved a Pyrrhic failure<\/em>. The collaboration between playwright and composer produced a varied range of works of musical theatre, half spoken and half sung, classified under very diverse labels: they include barely a couple of true operas, but also pastoral<\/em> and musical<\/em> comedias and, above all, zarzuelas. Their subjects are mythological, and in them spoken theatre alternates \u2013 according to complex symbolic codes \u2013 with dances, coplas sung by rustic characters, sung recitatives (usually given to the gods), ariosos and, above all, tonos humanos<\/em> and divinos<\/em> (secular and sacred songs). These play the musical role of Italian arias, though with a simple strophic song form (as in La noche tenebrosa) <\/em>or, almost always, with a refrain, which links them to the Spanish tradition of the villancico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hidalgo was fortunate to possess a fertile melodic imagination, which allowed him to adorn the apparent formal simplicity of the tono<\/em> with a subtle melodic weave, in delicate relation to the words. He was a harpist and keyboard player at court for almost all of his long life, but we have the misfortune that most of his work disappeared in the fire that destroyed the great palace of the Madrid court, the Alc\u00e1zar, in 1734 \u2013 a disaster in which Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s Las meninas<\/em> very nearly perished too. Even worse fortune, if possible, befell the work of one of Hidalgo\u2019s predecessors at court, Mateo Romero, known as \u201cMaestro Capit\u00e1n\u201d, a musician born in Li\u00e8ge but well adapted to Iberian musical peculiarities. His legacy suffered not only the Madrid fire but also the one that followed the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, since he had also worked for John of Braganza. Fortunately, we still have scattered manuscripts by both of them here and there, gathered in cancioneros<\/em>: palace collections of songs by various composers, written ad hoc<\/em> for chamber use or culled from theatrical works. Thanks to these cancioneros, now scattered across half the world \u2013 Munich, New York, Madrid, Venice\u2026 \u2013 the compositions of other first-rate vocal composers of the Spanish court have also survived, such as the adventurous Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00edn: tenor, composer, cleric and murderer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like vocal music, the instrumental music of Baroque Spain received few foreign influences, and those it did came from the courts of the Spanish dominions: thus the Neapolitan Falconieri, in the service of his city\u2019s viceroy, blended the Spanish manner with the new Italian violin style. But by then the instrument destined to become the national one, the guitar, was already enjoying its first heyday. In the hands of Gaspar Sanz, Guerau and many others it created a characteristic idiom of its own, full of its own resources, from strict polyphony to rasgueado. Its rhythmic and harmonic drive made it ideal for dances such as the chacona, the passacaglia, the marionas or the zarabanda, whose ostinato<\/em> chord sequences and strong triple metre \u2013 with frequent hemiolas \u2013 betray a popular origin, in many cases even from Spanish America. That did not stop them from spreading, by way of Versailles, into the art music of the whole of Europe. The guitar may be the best summary of the music of that Spain: vernacular, with popular roots, rhythmic, flexible, fascinating\u2026 and, for all that, perhaps a little incomprehensible to foreigners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 31 March 1685, the very day that a certain Johann Sebastian Bach came into the world thousands of kilometres from Madrid, Juan Hidalgo was buried in the parish church where he had been baptised, San Gin\u00e9s. In that very place, and at the very moment these notes are being written, 329 years later, the same posthumous honour is being paid to the chief executive of a well-known Spanish department store. O tempora, o mores<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juan Ram\u00f3n Lara<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n
\n
\n

CANTAR DE AMOR
Juan Hidalgo and 17th-century Spain<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Juan Sancho, tenor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rami Alqhai, violone
Johanna Rose, viola da gamba
Enrike Solinis, baroque guitar & archlute
Francisco Javier N\u00fa\u00f1ez, harpsichord
Pedro Estevan, percussion
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & musical direction<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recorded at Espacio Santa Clara, Seville, in January 2015 by Jordi Gil (Sputnik – Grabaciones Estelares)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\n
    \n
  1. Andrea Falconieri (c. 1585-1656)
    Passacalle \u00e0 tre 2:42<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Jos\u00e9 Mar\u00edn (c. 1618-1699)
    No piense Menguilla ya 3:16<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. A. Falconieri
    Ciaccona a tre 1:46<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Juan Hidalgo (1614-1685)
    Trompic\u00e1valas Amor 2:36<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. J. Hidalgo
    La noche tenebrosa 5:32<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Francisco Guerau (1649-c. 1722)
    Marionas 5:21<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Mateo Romero \u2018Capit\u00e1n\u2019 (c. 1575-1647)
    Ay, que me muero de zelos 5:30<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. J. Hidalgo
    Esperar, sentir, morir 4:39<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. Gaspar Sanz (1640-1710) \/ Fahmi Alqhai (b. 1976)
    Pavana 4:11<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. J. Hidalgo
    Ay, que me r\u00edo de Amor 3:06<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  11. J. Hidalgo
    Ay amor, ay ausencia 4:26<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  12. G. Sanz
    Passacalle sobre la D 4:41<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  13. J. Hidalgo
    Recitativo a lo humano: Rompa el aire en suspiros 5:16<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  14. M. Romero \u2018Capit\u00e1n\u2019
    Romerico florido 3:08<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n\n\n\n



    Arrangements: Fahmi Alqhai<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n