Manuel De Falla’s Music in Letters: Nationalism, Internationalism, And Modernism in his Correspondence with Enrique F. Arbós (1916–1939)

Abstract

The correspondence between Manuel de Falla and the conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós, which went on for more than twenty years and includes more than two hundred unpublished documents, reveals important exchanges of aesthetic conception, which bridge the divide between traditionalism and modernism, and reveal previously unknown information about the international reach of Falla’s music and the creation of an image around the quintessential Spanish composer of the time. This article analyses Arbos’s biography in relation to his aesthetics and cosmopolitan outlook before moving to a discussion of his correspondence with Falla, which sheds valuable new light on Falla’s move towards modernism. By focusing on key institutions and events at the time (such as the Sociedad de Autores and the 1936 ISCM Festival in Barcelona), I interrogate the dialectic between nationalism and internationalism in European music during the first decades of the twentieth century.