An Argentinian Stravinsky or Bartók? An Argentinian Falla, Debussy or Villa-Lobos? Alberto Ginastera has been called all of these and more, in an attempt – born of unwitting Eurocentricity, perhaps – to pigeonhole his music, and make it comprehensible to an audience raised on old-world classical masterpieces.
When and where was Alberto Ginastera born?
But Buenos Aires, where Ginastera was born in April 1916 to a Catalan father and Italian mother, was anything but a musical backwater. It had, for one thing, a distinguished music college, the Williams Conservatory, which the young Ginastera entered for his basic training aged 12.
Just two years later, he heard Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for the first time, and it struck him like a thunderbolt. ‘The Rite was like a shock – something new and unexpected,’ he wrote later. ‘The primitivism of the music, its dynamic impulse and the novelty of its language impressed me as the work of a genius.’
What was his first major composition?
Stravinsky’s potent influence found its way into the ballet score Panambí, which Ginastera began writing while still at the Conservatory. While movements such as the poundingly brutal ‘Danza de los guerreros’ and ‘Inquietud del tribu’ crib unashamedly from The Rite, Panambí as a whole is an assured and powerful debut, full of distinctive touches. Its choice of subject matter – a legend of the native Argentinian Guaraní Indians – also signals the preoccupation with indigenous traditions which runs through much of Ginastera’s subsequent music.
This didn’t happen by accident: Ginastera heard a performance of Bartók’s Allegro barbaro in Buenos Aires by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein and it snapped into arresting focus his hitherto vague notions of how Argentinian identity might be expressed within the classical tradition. The Magyar folk inflections of the Bartók hit him, he said, with ‘the bewilderment of a revelation’, and ‘filled in all the gaps I felt in my conception of forging a national music’
Estancia (‘Ranch’), a ballet set on the vast, grassland plains of central Argentina, was the eventual consequence. It was commissioned by the impresario Lincoln Kirstein who, on tour with his American Ballet Caravan, had been alerted to the young Ginastera’s prodigious talent by the belated Buenos Aires premiere of Panambí in 1940. Ginastera’s choice of a pampas setting, and his focus on the tough, nomadic life of the cattle-herding gauchos, was a result of his direct experience of that harsh but beautiful environment.
‘Whenever I have crossed the pampa or have lived in it for a time,’ he wrote, ‘my spirit has felt itself inundated by changing impressions, now joyful, now melancholy, some full of euphoria and others replete with a profound tranquility, produced by its limitless immensity and by the transformation that the countryside undergoes in the course of a day.’
Ginastera's ballet Estancia
This grounding of Estancia’s action in the soil of Ginastera’s native country was further underpinned by his inclusion of excerpts from Martin Fierro, an epic poem by José Hernández embodying the turbulent lifestyle of the 19th-century gaucho, and embedding it deeply as an image of heroic individualism and machismo in the Argentinian psyche. The baritone solos setting Hernández’s verses are among the most evocative moments in the ballet, which is Ginastera’s first masterpiece. At a stroke it establishes an arresting template for the development of a distinctive national music in Argentina, and is a remarkable achievement for a composer in his mid-20s.
The period of Estancia was significant for another reason: while writing it, Ginastera had his first, momentous meeting with US composer Aaron Copland. Copland came to Buenos Aires in 1941 as a cultural envoy of the Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations. His mission was to scout new talent – individuals who might benefit from training opportunities in the US. Ginastera struck him as the perfect candidate.
‘He is looked upon with favour by all groups here, is presentable, modest almost to the timid degree, and will, no doubt, some day be an outstanding figure in Argentine music,’ Copland told his diary. Although Copland’s Billy the Kid had undoubtedly influenced Estancia, the relationship was by no means one-sided. Just a year after returning to America, Copland’s new ballet Rodeo premiered to great acclaim, its cowboy theme, folksy orchestrations and ‘Hoe-Down’ finale suggesting obvious areas of cross-pollination with Ginastera’s gaucho story.
When did Ginastera go to the USA and how did the country influence him?
Prompted by Copland, Ginastera applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in the US, which was granted. By now, though, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had drawn the US into World War II, postponing Ginastera’s visit. He was also becoming embroiled in the turbulent politics of his own country: in 1945, he lost a teaching post for protesting against the new Argentine military regime’s sacking of academics who criticised its scorched-earth political tactics.
When, later that year, the path was finally cleared for travel to the US, Ginastera enthusiastically took it. His 15-month stay there was a seminal period – he attended Copland’s composition classes at Tanglewood, had several of his works premiered and absorbed the music of progressive composers such as Schoenberg, Sessions and Carter.
The result was immediate, giving a tougher, more modernistic edge to his own compositions. Ginastera described the shift as being from what he termed the ‘objective nationalism’ of his early period – where he deploys folkloric elements in a broadly tonal context – to the ‘subjective nationalism’ of the post-US years, where vernacular influences are less obvious and tonality more ambiguous.
Typical of this second period is the String Quartet No. 1, where the driving rhythms of the gaucho’s ‘malambo’ dance propel the opening movement, and the open-string chord of his guitar sounds at the beginning of the ‘Calmo e poetico’ third. These native elements are, though, now fully subsumed within a taut, urgently expressive structure and a newly rebarbative language. A similar aesthetic informs the Piano Sonata No. 1 (1952), another strongly propulsive piece brimming with nervous energy.
Ginastera himself identified one final period in his creative life, which he termed ‘neo-expressionism’. For cultural inspiration, he now delved back deeper in time, to the period before Columbus’s arrival brought European habits of thought and behaviour to the American continent. Technically, the influence of 12-tone serialism became more pronounced than ever. The consequence was both the most distinctive and the most original music of Ginastera’s career as a composer, if not the most approachable…
Pre-Columbian primitivism pervades Cantata para América Mágica (1960), a key work of this final period and one deploying, in addition to a soprano soloist, 15 percussionists playing over 50 different instruments. The effect stunned audiences at the Cantata’s premiere in Washington, DC. One critic hailed the music as ‘stylistically unique’, creating ‘an almost frightening feeling that one was being transported to a new and enchanting world of fantastic sound’.
When did Ginastera die and what was his last piece?
The quest to portray the primal origins of South American existence continued to the end of Ginastera’s life. In Popol Vuh, incomplete at his death, aged 67, in 1983, he represented Mayan myths of mankind’s creation and development, in a convulsive orchestral maelstrom, harbouring some of the most savage sounds in classical music since Stravinsky.
That cultural deep-rootedness is the key to Ginastera’s music. As he himself put it: ‘I experience great happiness and at the same time a profound emotion upon feeling that my music (which always resulted from great personal effort and was sometimes condemned due to political motives in my own country) is now appreciated in artistic and academic centres of the world and in some way symbolises the art and culture of my country.’
Ginastera is buried in the Cimetière des Rois, Geneva
The best recordings of Ginastera's music
Estancia; Ollantay; Pampeana No. 3
BBC Philharmonic/Mena
Chandos CHAN 10884
Gaucho life and the ‘limitless immensity’ of the pampas are vividly evoked in the ballet Estancia.
String Quartets
Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Brilliant Classics 9119
Intensity and rhythmic sinew mark these increasingly edgy, modern-sounding pieces.
Ginastera: the vocal album
Plácido Domingo; Ana-Maria Martínez; Virginia Tola
Warner 0825646868308
From song to opera, populist to progressive, this is an ideal introduction to Ginastera’s vocal output.
Popol Vuh; Cantata para América Mágica
WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln/Stefan Asbury
Neos NEOS10918
Ginastera goes primaeval, mining the deep past of the pre-Columbian continent.
Illustration by Risko