{"id":682,"date":"2013-02-19T01:39:31","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T01:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turtlepointpress.com\/traveltainted\/?p=682"},"modified":"2015-03-15T13:02:12","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T17:02:12","slug":"my-youthful-indiscretions-by-isaac-albeniz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turtlepointpress.com\/traveltainted\/my-youthful-indiscretions-by-isaac-albeniz\/","title":{"rendered":"My Youthful Indiscretions, By Isaac Alb\u00e9niz"},"content":{"rendered":"

MY YOUTHFUL INDISCRETIONS<\/strong><\/span>
BY ISAAC ALB\u00c9NIZ<\/span>
with a history of my adventures<\/span>
in the United States<\/span>
(Los indiscreciones de los a\u00f1os de mi juventud<\/span>
con una historia de mis aventuras <\/span>
en los Estados Unidos)<\/span>
translated, annotated, and disambiguated <\/span>
by A. I. Belasanczi, BA, MA, PDQ<\/span><\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caminante, son tus huellas<\/i>
<\/i>Traveller, your own footsteps
Se hace el camino, y nada, m\u00e1s;<\/i>
<\/i>make the road, and nothing more;<\/i>
caminante, no hay camino,<\/i>
Traveller, there is no other road,
se hace camino al andar.<\/i>
<\/i>You make your own road as you advance.
Al andar se hace camino\u2026<\/i>
As you advance you make a road\u2026
\u00a0
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u2014Antonio Machado
<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

UNO1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

I emerged from my mother\u2019s exhausted womb after a dilatory gestation of eleven months and fifteen days to begin my stroll toward\u00a0Iberia,<\/i>\u00a0with an heir presumptive\u2019s wave, a whistler\u2019s insouciant greeting in the key of Db where I was destined to linger in later years, and a bow to acknowledge the mid-wife\u2019s applause. I weighed eleven pounds and fifteen ounces, not a bouncing baby boy but a toddler on his way to glory as Spain\u2019s greatest composer, arguably the greatest composer of the Iberian Peninsula, to trail in my wake\u2014in good time more immediate than now seems credible\u2014an astonishing if redundant catalogue of ladies, their ardor having inspired my prodigious feats at the keyboard as well as my youthful indiscretions. I did not wail soprano, pushing headward into the world; I strutted out singing a tenor\u2019s clarion call on perfect pitch. Moreover, I would have rhythmed my proud gait with castanets and hammered rat-ta-tat with heels of steel against the floor of my exhausted mother\u2019s birth canal had it been tiled, either in the plain and placid terra cotta tints that shelter us, or in one or another of the rococo patterns that drench our lives in spectrums of color to signify my Spanish heritage: I am a Roman, I am a Christian, I am a Jew, I am a Moor! \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Camprod\u00f3n de Geroa, the morning air was fresh on May twenty-ninth in 1860.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Expelled into the light by pirouetting there from the darkness where I had germinated like an orchid, slow to grow but then beautiful for a lengthy blossoming, I embraced the scents of saffron, bougainvillea, olive oil, my father\u2019s rose pomade, open drains, garlic, mussels from the Mediterranean, sweat, and fresh bread, also the sounds of my busy town, the chapel of Santa Maria where bells rang out, the river ran under the arched viaduct, and the clattering beaks of our resident storks on every roof and chimney, stabbing the air with their syncopations. I welcomed the whinnying of horses below in the courtyard, the casual blasphemies which punctuated the folk songs that our domestic lackeys Joachim, J\u00f3an, and Juan, crooned at their work, the high murmur of the market outside our wrought-iron gates, and the thin vocalise of my sister Clementina\u2019s soprano, all preparatory to my breakfast assault on my exhausted mother\u2019s swollen breasts. Even in the cozy cradle of my exhausted mother\u2019s interiority, I had practiced scales against the placenta as well as my vocabulary against the echo chamber that her belly made.<\/p>\n

\"Joachim<\/a>

Joachim Serrano, Juan Bolitasoro, J\u00f3an Alcachofas<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEnough exhaustion, Madrecita!\u201d I cried, falling to, and rising up for air only long enough to congratulate her on my arrival. Papa stood nearby, twirling the little points of his moustachios. Rising up and down on the balls of his neat feet, to keep time with his latest suckling\u2019s greedy suckling and watching his pocket-watch the while in some impatience. Big business at the town hall ceased during his absence and required inspiration borne of encouragement in the form of boots to backsides, little pinches to cheeks, and larger ones to bottoms. Stenographers laid aside their pens and took up their knitting needles, tatting bobbins, and web weavers to spin out lace mantillas. The lazy boys who polished the marble floors carried away the day\u2019s debris from their overflowing canisters, and the trolley duennas who delivered cups of chocolate slumped asleep still standing up, but my papa was eager to return to oil the delicate mechanisms that kept the city percolating.<\/p>\n

May twenty-ninth is a problematic day for saints, there being none to call upon for succor or inspiration but Joachim de Flora, the twelfth-century mystic who dreamed that angels libationed his wine in abundance while he danced with their daughters across La Via de Leche. When he had drunk his fill, between ethereal spinnings among the stars, they commiserated that he had not drained the goblet dry, for the final dregs would have rewarded him with the secret of life. When subsequently he fell short of his promise for perception, the papacy dismissed his weighty tomes that extolled the virtues of the Holy Ghost over the other two-thirds of the Trinity, suspecting him of heresy likely to encourage Protestants, Jews, Gypsies, Blackamoors, Muslims, Hindi, professional virgins, academics, secular royalty, and other pretenders to the Throne of God, all to mutinies against the sanctity of the Holy City of Rome. No matter: Saint Joachim de Flora\u2014admittedly only an unofficial saint\u2014is worthy to mark my day, for I am Terpsichore\u2019s Second Coming at the keyboards of the world, with all gratitude to my parents who later lived very well indeed as a result of my prodigal gifts.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"\u00c1ngel<\/a>

\u00c1ngel and Dolores Pascual Alb\u00e9niz<\/p><\/div>\n

My father, \u00c1ngel Alb\u00e9niz from Vitoria, had married my mother, Dolores Pascual from Figueras, a virgin ripe at fifteen for motherhood. He was thirty, a government official doing astonishingly little but collect taxes from people who could ill-afford to pay them, in exchange for the substantial income that kept his considerable brood in French laces and brocades, silks from China, woven woolens from Catalan sheep, eiderdowns from Baltic ducks and cashmeres from Indian goats, and himself in Harris tweeds from Inverness\u2014where I would one day triumph before dour Scotsmen\u2014befitting government officials for doing so astonishingly little. Spain at the time was ruled by Isabella II, a lady given to hot pursuits of extracurricular consorts, and her governing board was overrun with a nouveau riche in search of respectability associated with the church and crown that squatted in tandem on us. Below that relatively small clique of cultural aspirants, of which my proud padre was a charter member, a sprawling army of ill-paid flunkeys toadied at several occupations to make the ends of their frayed livelihoods meet, while junior lieutenants in the Queen\u2019s military units labored variously in the moonlight: as waiters in cantinas or as clergy vergers who flushed the drains and hauled the rubbish of the town after performing similar chores for the holy fathers they served. As for Spain\u2019s tillers of the soil, having no access to alternate employment, they starved until their crops came in, living off the land as best they could, begging in front of cathedrals when they could not, and trading off a goat here, a daughter there, for sufficient coin to see them through the season. \u00a0<\/p>\n

But I knew nothing of such inequities, scarcely dry from my protracted belly bath. I only drew in lungsful of Spain\u2019s clear air when I arrived to take my place as the youngest member of the house of Alb\u00e9niz y Pascual, destined to be its most important member, destined indeed for an earthly immortality to be reckoned with.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Four siblings preceded me in a musical brood: Enriquetta, Marco, Clementina, and Blanca\u2014como se dice stair-steps? pasos de escalera\u2014at six, five, four, and three when I joined them. Clementina, whose singing I have already remarked, although I might add that she soon compensated for the limitations of her range\u2014she was a contralto without top or bottom but an impressive four-note middle from an E to a B by turning to several noble orchestral instruments, on which she subsequently grew moderately proficient. However, she grew, too, into a mean-spirited spinster who inherited our father\u2019s paunch and his acumen in directing underlings as well as my own career once upon a time, not without misstepping the fandangos of his aspirations. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Marco<\/a>

Marco and Enriquetta Alb\u00e9niz<\/p><\/div>\n

My poor brother Marco lacked the courage to learn to write or count or read or wipe his bum. He spent his days instead admiring the gardeners\u2019 efforts that graced the grounds of our hacienda, one of God\u2019s minions, drooling into space when he was not smiling at the cork trees and absently fingering his flute.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Blanca aspired first to operetta to trill in zarzuelas, and, failing that, to become a bride of Christ as Sister Consumci\u00f3n de las Canci\u00f3nes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Blanca<\/a>

Blanca and Clementina Alb\u00e9niz<\/p><\/div>\n

Enriquetta was eldest, here listed last, I suppose, because she left us first to harmonize with the Heavenly Host.<\/p>\n

I was named Isaac, in honor of the Jews who undulated into Spain from the East, embracing Holy Church to avoid the rigors of the rack during the Inquisition. One of them was instrumental in persuading the Alb\u00e9niz family to trade its semitic buzz that concluded our family name.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

\u00a0The speech impediment which had so sorely afflicted some now-forgotten monarch\u2014according to the aspersive legend burnished by years of cultivated supposition\u2014that the country, in a single wave of affection, adopted it. By the time of my advent, for example, thaffron thented our rithe, my eldeth thithter\u2019th thoprano thplit the thilenth in our Thpanith houthhold, and our family name wath forever altered to Alb\u00e9nith, joining the reth of the country in lithping ith way through hithory.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for my musical ancestors, there may have been two of them, although in truth Alb\u00e9niz is Castillian, and my family is Catalan, and torn between the two I have always considered myself Moorish, a glamorous and dangerous badge of identity to describe one\u2019s roots to concert-goers more interested in my music than in my geography, confusing the subtle interstices of Iberia<\/i> with the waves of the Spanish mien. One of my improbable progenitors was an uncle, Pedro Alb\u00e9niz,6<\/a><\/sup> court organist in Madrid until his pipes failed five years before my birth, left as his legacy to Spain an avant-garde approach to playing that employed double flats enunciated with single digits, thereby freeing other of his fingers to render thickened chords and denser harmonies than a more aenemic polyphony had encouraged. Don Alvaro Narciso Hernando Pirelli\u2014the cathedral\u2019s estimable cardinal\u2014was not at first pleased with Tio Pedro\u2019s musical audacity since it suggested scriptural infelicity. A coterie of parishioners, including the Infanta Eulalia-Irene, however, endorsed it with substantial contributions, and he changed his mind.<\/p>\n

Following Uncle Pedro\u2019s presence at the triple manuals in the Cathedral of Clemenza, sending echoes of his transfigurations to its Mauro-Hispanic rafters, our antecedental Matteo Alb\u00e9niz,7<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0a pragmatic Jewish monk who had long before known which side of his matzoh was buttered. He composed cantatas for Christmas celebrations, masses for Sunday services, and ditties redolent of Spanish earth to accompany sherry and tapas before confession and the evening meal in his monastery at San Sebastian.<\/p>\n

I was named Isaac Ma\u00f1uel Francisco Alb\u00e9niz y Pascual. The center names\u2014added only at the altar when one or another of the holy fathers there sprinkled me against the ennui promised us in Limbo\u2014were in honor of my grandfathers. Francisco Pascual fashioned corks for wine, and Ma\u00f1uel Alb\u00e9niz preceded his son\u2014my father\u2014in thrall to the arbitrary machinations of the laws that governed Spain. I knew neither of them, Gigantepapa Francisco having drunk himself to death some years before on the plentiful supply of wine offered him by impecunious grape growers in lieu of payment, and Gigantepapa Ma\u00f1uel having run to fat at an early age and dying in flagrante delicto in the arms of Riti\u00f1a Monterey, a flamenco dancer of his passing acquaintance.<\/p>\n

And that is a sufficient history of my progenitors prior to this more fascinating account of Spain\u2019s greatest composer, arguably the greatest composer of the Iberian Peninsula, as I have already identified myself in pardonable pride, although there is sometimes wisdom in singing refrains twice over to set them clearly in the head of potential admirers.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

I stepped upon the stage which I was soon to conquer on una noche oscura y tempestuosa.8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Before the hour when curtains rise for performances to commence\u2014perhaps it is only in Spain where dark and stormy nights occur with mathematical regularity\u2014poor Dolores Pascual, mi madre, drained and, as I have observed more than once, exhausted, grew weary of my fists against her fallen udders as I first emptied them and demanded further draughts to stave off hunger. \u00c1ngel, my father, living up to his name, carried me afoot\u2014because all the horses were spooked by the weather into unrousable somnolence\u2014and wrapped in his predominately purple cloak, to a wet nurse of his acquaintance, capable of satisfying my appetite.<\/p>\n

Do\u00f1a Felicia Novenido, who lived over a cantina at the wrong end of town, was thirty-five, the mother of a dozen children and, at the time, between deliveries and therefore available and well supplied to slake my considerable thirst. She was, I have been told, alarmed to discover that my eleven pounds and fifteen ounces had already increased in the space of an hour or two at my mother\u2019s bosom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Do\u00f1a<\/a>

Do\u00f1a Felicia Novenido, Wet Nurse<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cDios mio!\u201d she cried as I latched on for a late-night snack before settling down to sleep. In the morning, Do\u00f1a Felicia gave me breakfast too, feeding her own brood burnt porridge and a hasty splash of milk from the goat grazing in the debris behind the cantina, all in exchange for Papa\u2019s ducats. After several meals born of her efforts, abetted by those of my mother\u2014by then recovered and back into her whalebones and mantillas\u2014I weighed in at fifteen pounds and eleven ounces and had begun tapping out the rhythms of a jota, a fandango, or a doloretes, depending upon the time of day, against the wooden walls of my cradle.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I was not yet two years old, Papa was elevated in station and ascended from the relative obscurity of Camprod\u00f3n to Barcelona, with a substantial increase in income at the expense of slaveys, clerks, and foot soldiers put out to early retirement without pension. In celebration, my father bought a pianoforte for Clementina. She had by that time graduated from scales to songs in the latest zarzuelas and pleasured herself with florid accompaniments. They sent me into such a frenzy of delight that I edged her from the piano stool with a rude rotation of my hips, took her place before the rosewood case and the polished ivory and ebony keys, illuminated by my mother\u2019s silver candlelabra on either side, and spelled out an haba\u00f1era of such extravagant complexity that Clementina burst into tears of jealousy, then swallowed her pride and took it upon herself to give me lessons.<\/p>\n

When I was three years old\u2014blessed all too apparently with a phonographic ear that could reproduce at the pianoforte whatever it heard\u2014I entertained my parents\u2019 guests after dinner with an alphabet of improvisations on familiar melodies, from Bach to Schumann, pausing en route for Mozart, with an encore by Franz Liszt, always Liszt from the time I cut my baby teeth on his La Campanella.<\/i> What nobler composition could have challenged my chubby fingers, yet unable to reach beyond a fifth? Nevertheless, they embraced such difficulties as they could. In between these neonatal efforts my father\u2014single-minded to encourage me\u2014insisted that I sleep with weights dependent from my fingers, laces of chamois twined around and tied to lead soldiers that dangled on either side all night. With my arms fast-bound to the walls of my crib, my fingers felt the air, and when they moved, during my fretful sleep, battles raged in space among the Lilliputian troops. My father was somewhat overzealous, I hazard, in his zeal to produce an aesthetic rather than a mercenary breadwinner in the family. \u00a0<\/p>\n

When I was four years old, I gave my first recital, at the Teatro Rom\u00e9a in Barcelona, where the posters out in front announced a program likely to prove a challenge to pianists of considerably greater age and maturity than mine. Bowing to the audience with an apologetic smile, my proud father carried me on stage, sitting me high atop a stool on heavily brocaded pillows, my tiny trotters far above the pedals of the pianoforte. Then, acknowledging my auditors with a bounce of my ebony curls, I attacked Dussek\u2019s Les Adipeux<\/i> and a Weber concerto, afterwards as an encore improvising my own variations on a familiar theme by Franz Liszt, El sueno de amor<\/i>.9<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Isaac<\/a>

Isaac Alb\u00e9niz at the time of his first recital<\/p><\/div>\n

I took my bow amid the cries of appreciation, shouts of doubting auditors assailed the coral shells of my little ears until my eyebrows ascended, my lower lip depended, and my tear ducts opened to flood my cheeks. Audiences suspected some trick, probably a player sequestered in shadows at another keyboard behind the three-panelled screen of lattice draped with roseated shawls, framing me onstage, so I wrenched the wretched screen from its moorings to unveil the empty space between me and the cobwebbed slabs of Spanish stone of the back wall, bit my thumb in a rude gesture at my cruel skeptics, and ran them a cadenza of such brilliance\u2014up and down the keyboard with the speed of hummingbirds\u2019 wings and the glitter of a dowager\u2019s diamonds\u2014that they crossed themselves in reverent approbation. Some fell to their knees. One of the ushers fainted. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBravo!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBravithimo!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBravolito!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBarthelona thalute!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEncore, Ithaqui!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEncore, Ithaquithito!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cViva El Ni\u00f1o Prodigio de Espa\u00f1a!\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cViva El Prodigitito del Mundo!\u201d<\/p>\n

I played no more that night. In my dove-gray satin suit, scored across my pigeon\u2019s breast with a red and purple sash, my midnight curls bouncing on my swaggering shoulders, I skipped into the wings to cuddle in my mother\u2019s arms, to accept with more than a modicum of diffidence my father\u2019s pride, and to relieve the manager of a hefty fee.<\/p>\n

At four\u2014my lisp perfected to the voice of our fallen monarch whose speech may have so impaired fashion forever after\u2014I was taken up as the city\u2019s mascot with engagements before this titled family and that minor royalty, as well as in more than one vaudeville house featuring low comedians whose humor lay in contests of flatulence, tumbling twins who allez-ooped their circular demonstrations, whole families of acrobats, unicyclists, a stout soprano with several parrots who spread their wings at high notes and fanned the air in time to her vibrato, dwarfs who yodeled while standing on each other\u2019s heads, and ladies of the evening who dropped their mantillas inch by inch to the sweaty beat of stilettoed heels and nervous castanets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Soon enough, at subsequent performances, I had been elevated from the bottom of this tawdry bill to the close of the first half of it when el estrelito always appeared, just before la interrupcion. By that time Alb\u00e9nith was as familiar a name as, let us admit with arguable accuracy, Miguel de Thervanteth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Notes:<\/p>\n

<\/a>1. To preserve a degree of authenticity, some words and phrases have been retained in Spanish on occasion, although in some cases they have been preserved because they have proven untranslatable. At other times, Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s idiomatic refractions of phrase have encouraged the translator to approximate them in his insecure Spanish from his own English. The chapter numbers that he has rendered in Spanish, for example, reflect Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s early training in the language of Iberia and contribute, perhaps, an ocular note of authenticity for the reader. [back]<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>2. According to the estimable Grove\u2019s Dictionary of Music<\/i>, apparently drawing on H. J. Storer\u2019s insignificant monograph devoted to Alb\u00e9niz in The Musician<\/i>, May 1916, Isaac Manuel Francisco Alb\u00e9niz was born on 29 May 1860. Dr. Isabel Zancia, who has devoted rather more time to the subject of Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s birth than anyone else, has complexitized the date, concluding that social imbrications suggest he was born on 31 May 1859, largely because a male infant, identified in the record as \u201cI. A.\u201d was baptized at Santa Maria Cathedral at Camprod\u00f3n on that day. Since Shakespeare\u2014traditionally born on 23 April 1564\u2014was baptized three days later, on 26 April 1564, Dr. Zancia has reasoned, so must Alb\u00e9niz have been baptized three days later, on 3 June 1859. If so, however, the records in the Santa Maria would suggest that Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s parents were somewhat premature, either three months or nearly a year prior to his conception. There are records of course of generations of the faithful who had appropriate parts of their bodies anointed by the holy fathers in advance of conception to encourage fertility.\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>3. Alb\u00e9niz neglects mention of the autotelic St. Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi (1506\u20131607), the Florentine mystic who found her vocation in prayer to overcome inwardly carnal trials of the flesh, and St. Generosa de la Sil\u00e9ncia (1414\u20131437), whose holy orders prohibited both speech and sound. Perhaps Alb\u00e9niz ignored them deliberately because of their inapplicability to his especial talents. He might have mentioned, too, the coincidence of his calendar on June second\u2014the day of Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s christening\u2014St. Nicholas the Pilgrim (?\u20131094), the Greek shepherd boy who sang compulsively but only the Kyrie Eleison<\/i> to his woolen charges between long holidays in an Athens asylum for the insane where those religiously smitten were sometimes incarcerated.\u00a0 Despite Dr. Isabel Zancia\u2019s extraordinarily inventive defense of 1859 as a more felicitous year for Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s birth and baptism (see footnote 2) June 2, 1860, suggests itself more readily, at least as a musical appendage to his biography, because on that day the already celebrated young Madridian mezzo, who by dint of tonal cultivation through diet had become, by the age of sixteen, the reigning coloratura soprano of the period. Adelina Patti (1843\u20131919) was between tours and visiting her elder sister Carlotta (1840\u20131889), also an established soprano at the time, in Comprod\u00f3n de Genoa. In every likelihood they would have joined the choir that holy morning to sing in honor of the latest and youngest congregant, Mas cerca de mi Dios a Tu<\/i>. This new hymn, by the English actress and Unitarian Sara Flower Adams set to the air Bethany,<\/i> attributed to Lowell Mason, had proven so popular that it was taken up by virtually every religious sect on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and incorporated even into the Roman Catholic mass, with the tacit though silent approval of the Blessed Pius IX, who was rumored to have been heard to be humming it during his matutinal ablutions. Sir Arthur Sullivan\u2019s (1843\u20131900) more familiar setting for the poem antedated the birth of the composer by several years. Subsequently it proved to be appropriate for the American soprano, Jeannette MacDonald (1899\u20131957) to memorialize an earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and for a massed male choir to observe in some spiritual sobriety the sinking of the Titanic<\/i> in 1912. Although Alb\u00e9niz does not refer to the hymn by name in his memoirs, he relied with sufficient regularity on the Protestant hymnals of the period for his spontaneous and extemporaneous variations on traditionally familiar or currently popular tunes, for this translator to note the likelihood of his having employed Nearer My God to Thee <\/i>as well. There is no evidence that Alb\u00e9niz ever met Adelina Patti, but she preceded him by a season at Horace Tabor\u2019s Opera House in Leadville, Colorado.\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>4. Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s penchant for dangling participles may reflect the insouciance of his music, adding to his compositions a daring informality at the time he wrote them, although a dissymetrical intertextuality may suggest itself by too close an articulatable manifestation of this phenomenon in his music. Dr. Isabel Zancia, formerly on the faculty of the University of Barcelona and at last listing in the PMLA Directory<\/i> an adjunct faculty member at the Community College in Euphoria, Kansas, however, whose research into various fields includes nineteenth-century pedagogy, marked the infelicity to reflect Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s woefully neglected education, her inferential cognate resting on a network of tenacular roots in his prose, although her seeming preoccupation with the ortheopy with which she sometimes might be unnecessarily involved may serve deleteriously her pursuit of cognitional extrapolatory readings that rely perhaps too generously on Latinate constructions in defense of her distinction between Spanish and Catalan.\u00a0\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>5. According to the Dunlap-Oppenheimer Research Institute, there is a linguistic case to be made for the devoiced sibilant and the substitution of the inter-dental fricative, predicated not on some monarch\u2019s speech impediment but on the fact that th<\/i> was represented by c<\/i> and z<\/i> prior to the conclusion of the fifteenth century. At that time, c<\/i> with a cedilla<\/i> was pronounced ts<\/i>, while z<\/i> was pronounced dz<\/i>. Fifty years later, all sibilants were devoiced, both ts<\/i> and dz,<\/i> being subsequently pronounced ts<\/i>. By the middle of the seventeenth century, in southern Spain, ts<\/i> merged with s<\/i>, rendering s<\/i> and z<\/i> pronunciations interchangeable. In northern Spain, however, ts<\/i> lost its sibilance to become th<\/i>, while s<\/i> remained a distinct sound of its own. Latin American Spanish abjured th<\/i> in favor of s<\/i> because the majority of settlers emigrated from southern Spain. Little credence is now given to the explanation that the early Catalan operatic contralto, Sibilla de la Voce y Lagramissia, who employed a fanatic claque of rowdy boys\u2014popularly known as the Sibillants\u2014in attendance at every performance, was bludgeoned to death on stage by a jealous rival, now forgotten along with the monarch whose lisp challenged her claim to linguistic immortality. One member of the claque\u2014all of whom sang regularly in the Coro de los Ni\u00f1os de Barcelona\u2014forerunner of the celebrated Vienna Boys\u2019 Choir\u2014vowed to carry on Sibilla de la Voce\u2019s tradition by singing her roles himself. The young man, felicitously named Pajaro Cantor, was therefore obliged to undergo a heroic operation to maintain his pre-pubertal singing range, which operation became known as \u201cthe Devoicing of the Sibillant.\u201d In homage to his sacrifice, Spain is believed by some to have embraced his childish lisp, still intacto virgo when he died both in body and in voice. It was then held in general currency that the brave young Spaniard had anticipated the first Italian castrato by more than a century. There is further supporting though questionable evidence of this allegation in the colloquia, \u201cCastillian Second Person Dual-th and Andalusian Second Person-th: an Analogical Epistrophe,\u201d by Dr. Isabel Zancia, chair, in the international linguists\u2019 journal, Shields: Southeast European Language Evolution<\/i>, VI.2, summer 1967.\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>6. Pedro Alb\u00e9niz y Basante (1795\u20131855)\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>7. Matteo Antonio Perez de Alb\u00e9niz (1755\u2013?)\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>8. It seems likely that Alb\u00e9niz actually intended to suggest \u201ccerrada\u201d\u2014rather than \u201coscura\u201d\u2014although, from an idiomatic point of view, \u201cfigura de sinistera\u201d might more closely approximate the implications in the phrase originated\u2014according to tradition if not to verification by the present editor whose explorations into fiction have not included his novels\u2014by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803\u20131873) in one of his influential narratives as \u201ca dark and stormy night.\u201d The novels were noted for their philosophical though sometimes satiric commentary, apparent through a semiotic deconstruction of their narrativasional observations. Similarly, Bulwer-Lytton may have intended to suggest \u201ctormentosa\u201d rather than \u201ctempestuosa,\u201d in which instance the intertextual sublimations to the cultural influences on Alb\u00e9niz, then in fashion in Spain, might prove questionable in their application to him.\u00a0\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>9. There is some disagreement among scholars over the actual program of this first recital.\u00a0 Alb\u00e9niz is unclear: either he played Franz Dussek\u2019s Les Adieux<\/i> (The Goodbyes<\/i>) or Ladislaus Dussek\u2019s Les Adipeux<\/i> (The Fatties<\/i>). His handwriting is not always decipherable, his spelling is often cavalier, and his misassignment of composer or composition is not impossible. There is general concession that he played Carl Maria von Weber\u2019s Concertst\u00fccke in F<\/i>. Doubtless, Alb\u00e9niz added something by Franz Liszt whose work was to become an inevitable touchstone to conclude his recitals for several years, under its lugubrious title in musical Esperanto, Liebestraum<\/i>. Binary constructs notwithstanding, this suggests an early spiritual exploration coterminous with the ineffable ethnicity of music growing from the composer\u2019s heritage: Liszt\u2019s in Hungary, Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s in Spain, in the metaphysical analogues of Alb\u00e9niz\u2019s subsequent compositions. One contemporary account of this first recital\u2014that the young pianist was afterwards pelted with roses, which he welcomed, and with coin, which he would have welcomed had they not stung his skin on contact\u2014cannot be verified.\u00a0[back]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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