“But there are neither maps nor exercises to help us find the duende. We only know that he burns the blood like a poultice of broken glass, that he exhausts, that he rejects all the sweet geometry we have learned, that he smashes styles, that he leans on human pain with no consolation and makes Goya (master of the grays, silvers, and pinks of the best English painting) work with his fists and knees in horrible bitumens.”

-Federico Garcia Lorca (In Search of Duende 60)

For the past week I have focused my attention on how the Spanish Civil War impacted music and art both during and after the war. When speaking about duende, Lorca said that Spain is “a country of death, a country open to death.” Duende and war are tied together in many ways. The presence of death is a vital component of the duende and for people who have not seen true horror and felt the kind of pain that war creates, I think the state of duende may be harder, but not impossible, to access. While studying the Inquisition and the Spanish Civil War I have noticed a spike in creative works that contain duende made within these time frames.

Let’s look at the basic origins of flamenco (for more information see my blog post about the Inquisition), when the Inquisition began large groups of people from many cultures had to escape into the hills to avoid persecution. These people survived solely on what they could scavenge and rob from passing caravans and for many of these people being found meant they faced execution. Undergoing these immense hardships together meant that music was shared and mixed into the most primitive form of flamenco, the cante jondo (deep song). Federico Garcia Lorca explained the siguiriya (the oldest form of cante jondo) as a song that “begins with a terrible scream that divides the landscape into two ideal hemispheres. It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.”

It seems that over the years, the more distant death and anguish became, the more duende seemed to fade from the music and art of Spain. In the early 1900’s the great composer Manuel de Falla, who is widely known for integrating Spanish folk music into his classical compositions sought to revive cante jondo and began a festival that aimed to bring together all the cantadores who sang with duende.This festival was part of a larger movement to combat the commercialized form of flamenco that was beginning to take hold of Spain, and to remind musicians what duende was and why it was so important.

Unfortunately the movement to revive flamenco was largely unsuccessful but duende lives in all the “black sounds” and it wasn’t long until it surfaced again.

In the summer of 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out (for more information on this see my last post). The war is often referred to as a “testing ground” for World War 2 because of the multitude of medical advancements made but also because of the immense brutality. “The record of nationalist atrocities is sickening,” says Richard Rhodes in his book Hell and Good Company, “…extending to gang rape, castration, and mutilation in the name of restoring the glory of Christian Spain.”

Although there were many horrific atrocities carried out by the nationalist army during the war, the most famous is perhaps the aerial bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica in 1937. This bombing is known as the first raid carried out on a defenseless civilian population by a modern air force and inspired many artists, including Pablo Picasso who painted his famous anti-war painting Guernica.

The Spanish Civil War inspired painters like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, and composers like Pablo Casals, Manuel de Falla, and Joaquin Turina. When the war ended many of these people were either banned from ever returning to Spain or they simply chose not to.

Pablo Casals, so devastated by what had happened to his country stopped performing in protest. In Pablo Casals: A Biography the author says “His withdrawal into silence was the greatest action he could make.” When Casals finally began performing again, he refused to perform in any country that had oppressive governments or that supported Franco’s regime. At the end of every performance he would finish with the Catalan folk song The Song of the Birds that had given hope to the Catalan people during the war and throughout the duration of the dictatorship. He was a really incredible man and I would highly recommend reading his autobiography Joys and Sorrows.

In the August of 1936 Franco’s army took over the small town of Alfacar in southern Spain. Shortly afterwards they arrested Federico Garcia Lorca and executed him because he was gay and anti-nationalist. A prominent Spanish writer who was loved by many, this act of brutality prompted those who loved him to take a creative and political stand against Franco.

One of the most well known writers who wrote about Lorca’s death is Luis Cernuda. After the war Cernuda fled to London and never returned to Spain. War and death profoundly affected everything he wrote and the feeling of duende is persistent in most of his work.

These scattered profiles are in no way meant to be conclusive but I hope that they provide some sense of the effects that the Spanish Civil War had on Spanish artists, composers, and writers and the work it inspired them to create.

People who remained in Spain suffered greatly after the war but under Franco’s oppressive regime art and music was heavily censored which is one of the reasons why most of the works with duende were almost entirely created outside of Spain.

Some of the most well known composers, like Manuel de Falla, were “forgiven” by Franco for any sympathies they had for the republican party and offered large grants if they returned to Spain but as far as I’m aware none of them accepted and most never returned to Spain.