Nights in the Gardens of Spain

The hot weather always seems to trigger off an urge to listen to Manoel de Falla's composition for piano and orchestra entitled Nights in the Gardens of Spain. There is something about the three movements that seems, to my mind at least, to glamorise the otherwise sheer enervation that the climb to the 30° range brings with it and makes me forget, for a brief half hour, the dustbowl we live in. Although the heat in the Falla masterpiece is almost palpable, the lushness of its vivid imagery conjures up cool visions of the splendid Alhambra and Generalife palaces and gardens. The splendid music, full of inimitable Spanish nuance and sinuous melodic lines, paints a picture of what the idealised Mediterranean should be like during the summer months.

Spain is a country which is very different to the rest of Europe; its history, traditions and outlook make it a place of deep contrasts and strong colours, of bullfights with their insane bravery and equally insane cruelty, of flamencos and jotas with their frills and thumping rhythms made by stamping of feet underlying seductive clicks of castanets and fritillaric prestidigitation on twanging guitars. It is the country that has produced the glorious earthiness of Francisco Goya and the ethereal beauty of Velasquez, the dark tortured canvasses of El Greco and the enigmatic creations of Picasso. Yet, Spain itself remains mysterious and for the most part misunderstood.

While the great processions of Seville remain a way of life, progressive Spain has defied the rest of the world by pulling out of the Iraqi War after a controversial election result and is advocating avant garde developments like the institution of gay marriage! It is precisely because of the violent contrasts in its history that Spain keeps surprising us. In a recent Pedro Almodovar film, Bad Education, the contrast of the repressive Franco regime and the total permissive explosion that resulted afterwards is graphically and forcefully illustrated by the transformations experienced by the same characters.

Spain is a geographical expression for the different kingdoms within the Iberian Peninsula; the northernmost Basque, the central Castilian, the Mediterranean Aragonese and the southern ex-Moorish ones. Spain was once totally ruled by the Arabs whose empire stretched from the sands of Arabia across North Africa, encompassing Sicily and Malta and stretching across the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain right up to the Pyrenees!

It was the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in the 15th century that unified the Spain we know today that gave that final impetus to the Reconquista. The last Moorish King of Granada, Boabdil, surrendered Granada and, while Isabella and her sidekick Tomas de Torquemada began their ethnic cleansing of Jews and Moors, Christopher Columbus discovered America by accident, pouring much needed gold into the Spanish coffers making it the strongest and most formidable state in Europe. Sadly the extirpation of the Jewish and Moorish communities, always the economic mainstays of Mediaeval Europe, weakened Spain's economy and, despite the American riches pouring in, Spain became poorer.

Habsburg Spain is epitomised in the royal portraits of lantern-jawed and sad-eyed men and women in dark satins and silks, trapped in their ruffs and farthingales, ruling on a declining country where, for some inexplicable reason, the system froze in its tracks and the development of the country was left far behind by a progressive France and England. As Spanish Infantas married their cousins the Austrian Archdukes and Austrian Archduchesses married their cousins the Spanish Infantes, the jaws became larger and the eyes sadder, till in 1700 the death of Carlos II unleashed the long war of the Spanish Succession ending with a Bourbon ex Duc d'Anjou, iberianised into Borbon, on the throne of Spain, just as we have today.

Meanwhile Spain was crystallised in its own rich tradition; its sound and colour unmistakeable and unique. The memory of lantern-jawed princesses still lives in the unearthly Pavane pour une Infante defunte by Maurice Ravel, a piece I cannot listen to without conjuring up Velasquez's greatest masterpiece Las Meninas. The horrors of the Napoleonic invasion inspired Goya into producing an almost stomach churning series of etchings just as the Spanish Civil War inspired Picasso's Guernica. Artists in Spain seemed to have no trouble at all to depict both the beautiful and the horrifying with equal facility, ease and effect. Even the amazing architecture of Barcelona seems to have something tortured about it!

Since 1975, when Spain was liberated from the Fascist yoke and an enlightened Juan Carlos was placed on the restored Borbon throne, the Spanish people have regained and revived their traditions in full and also leapt light years ahead in custom and practice. The unexpected election of the Zapatero government following the terrorist train bombing orchestrated by Bin Laden has brought the Progressives into full throttle with battles no less fierce and bloody than those waged in the bullring, being fought over issues like Basque independence and the institution of gay marriage!

Despite all this, the Spanish are inordinately proud of their traditions and their customs. They do not feel that their music, dancing and bullfighting are a thing of the past but are as much part of them as their language and landscape.

Spanishness pervades their entire lives. We in Malta have the festa which goes from strength to strength defying modernity with ease; a very Spanish tradition if there ever was one over here, and, after centuries of foreign domination we are finally realising, both historically and culturally, who we really are. What we have not yet achieved is that fierce sense of pride in our being Maltese which makes us defend our heritage against the depredations of so-called progress and prosperity and it is this trait which makes it all the more difficult to realise a strong sense of identity which in the long run would do us a world of good.

kzt@onvol.net