Manuel de Falla: A splash of Spanish colour

This year's Proms will feature much of the music of Manuel de Falla. Though his works are few, they distil the history and culture of 20th-century Spain with passion and finesse, says Bayan Northcott

On 28 September 1939, a group of admirers gathered at the modest house in Granada of Manuel de Falla to wish wish him bon voyage. The pretext of his journey was a concert series in Buenos Aires, but everyone knew they were seeing the greatest Spanish composer of the day for the last time. Aging and frail though he was, and desperate to find peace of mind to finish what he hoped might be his crowning opus, he could simply no longer stand life in his war-torn, spiritually-riven homeland.

He never did return, dying at just short of 70 in up-country Argentina in 1946. The evening-length "scenic cantata" Atlantida, upon which he had toiled intermittently since 1927, was still in bits and pieces. And the published catalogue he left was not exactly abundant. Indeed, if one excepts his mostly unperformed early shots at the indigenous zarzuela genre of musical show, and a few additional songs and piano pieces that have resurfaced since his death, it amounts to no more than 15 scores.

His two short operas, two one-act ballets and two concertos which are being included in this year's Hispanic strand of the Proms must constitute between them at least half the playing time of his entire publications. The rest comprise two song-sets, three other solo settings and a brief chorus, three solo piano works, a single guitar piece and, as his last completed score, an orchestral miscellany of fanfares and arrangements. Not the least mystery about this exiguous output is how rapidly it was recognized and how steadily it has has held its place as the very apogee of 20th-century Spanish music.

Recalling their friendship during the years of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Stravinsky offered what, for him, was an exceptionally unbarbed assessment which suggests the beginning of an answer. Though Falla was "modest and withdrawn as an oyster," and "his nature was the most unpityingly religious I have ever known," Stravinsky also noted and valued his loyalty and musical perception: "His ear was very fine." When, after the premiere of The Three-Cornered Hat, says Stravinsky, "I told him that that the best music in the score was not necessarily the most 'Spanish', I knew my remark would impress him. And he did grow, though his material was so small he could not grow far."

Presumably, Stravinsky meant the emergence of a more "international", though still idiosyncratic, neo-classicism in the works Falla composed after the triumph of this ballet in 1919. In fact, the more explicit and localised Spanishry of the earlier music, following his first breakthrough with the opera La Vida Breve (1905), had long been discreetly complemented by French inflections from his residence in Paris between 1907 and 1914, when he was encouraged by Debussy, Ravel and Dukas (who famously described the sober-suited Falla as "un petit espagnole, tout noir"). Nor was neo-classicism his ultimate style. The few subsequent pieces, notably his marmoreal piano elegy Pour le Tombeau de Paul Dukas (1935), hint at what might have become a fully-fledged late manner of hieratic gravity, owing little to picture-postcard Spain or even Stravinsky.

All the same, a quick survey of his output seems to confirm a pretty narrow scope. Most of his pieces swing between a quasi-populist communal energy and a spare, often sombre austerity of mood and manner. Almost all his larger forms constitute chains of simple song or dance structures, often patterned from minimally varied accompaniment figures or rhythms. And, whether or not borrowed from Spanish vernacular sources, his basic melodic material tends to cling tightly to its keynote, often eked out by the obsessive permutation of a mere three or four pitches. The brief guitar Homanaje (1920) in memory of Debussy epitomises these characteristics.

Evidently this monk-like man, with his rigid rituals of daily life and prayer, approached composition as the most painstaking process. His sensuous piano concerto Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1911-15), his flamenco-inspired ballet El Amor Brujo (1914-15) and indeed The Three-Cornered Hat itself all went through smaller-scale preliminary versions before their final elaboration. His second opera, the half-hour Don Quixote episode Master Peter's Puppet Show (1919-22), was over two years late, while the Scarlatti-inspired Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments took three whole years, 1923-26, to achieve its 13-minute duration.

Yet if ever a composer stood for quality before quantity... From first to last there was a single-minded drive to achieve the most exact, intense, distilled essence of his sound materials and forms, whether their sources were vernacular, exotic or ascetic. And this evidently went hand in hand with a determination never to tackle the same compositional challenge twice. The result is a series of works that not only exemplify specific musical genres or trends, but seem to mediate a whole succession of broader cultural, social, even political issues of his Spanish life and times: the tensions between high art and the vernacular, between regionalism and nationalism, nationalism and internationalism, tradition and modernism, mysticism and secularism, and so on. As much as anything, it was Falla's perceived "take" on so many of these issues that propelled him to preeminence.

So, after creating at a stroke a kind of Spanish verismo treatment of ordinary life, in La Vida Breve, Falla immediately abandoned that particular approach to opera. And, just as Nights in the Gardens of Spain represents his definitive re-nationalisation, as it were, of the "Spanish" tradition in French impressionism, so El Amor Brujo is his unique synthesis of the Gypsy traditions of Andalucia. Where his earlier Four Spanish Pieces (1907) crystallised the inherited Spanish piano idiom of Albeniz, the later Fantasia Baetica (1919) integrated Castilian folk idioms in a more Bartokian spirit. And while Master Peter's Puppet Show raided the glorious Spanish 16th century for musical materials, so the Harpsichord Concerto took after secular and sacred idioms of the 18th

And Atlantida? Inspired by a text of the Catalan poet Jacinto Verdaguer, this was to comprise nothing less than a vast mythological vision of the making of the Spanish world itself. After Falla's death, the sketches for its first and third parts were found intact enough to realize, but the second part remained in fragments and alternative drafts, which even decades of effort by his devoted pupil Ernesto Halffter have never managed to work into a convincing whole. Yet scenes here and there, and, above all, the formidable 10-minute Prologue, which Falla left completely scored in its severe, strangely harmonised grandeur, suggest the magnitude of the achievement had Falla ever managed to pull it together.

But could he have? Through the 1920s, the man Stravinsky thought too shy even to conduct an orchestra was drawn relentlessly into public life. A deeply conservative Catholic, he reluctantly took on an official role at the founding of the Spanish Second Republic in 1931, but withdrew in horror when the church burnings spread – only to find himself trapped in Granada at the height of the Falangist atrocities. He risked pleading for his arrested friend Lorca, unaware the poet had already been murdered. But after the triumph of Franco, all that seemed left for Falla was flight to the New World. Not, however, before leaving behind an emblematic output unique in its darkly-bright fusion of passion and finesse.

The BBC Proms open tonight at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7589 8212) and all are broadcast live on Radio 3