Romancero Gitano

by Gail Holst

In April 1967 Mikis had just completed a cycle of songs to the Romancero Gitan of Garcia Lorca translated into Greek by Odysseus Elytis.

Although it ranks perhaps higher in quality than any of his pre-dictatorship song cycles, the Romancero Gitan was not destined to become a great popular success.

It was recorded in 1970 in Paris after Theodorakis's release from house arrest, and by the time Theodorakis returned to Greece he was concerned with new forms of composition.

When Theodorakis first read the Elytis translations of Lorca, he was excited by the parallels between the Spanish and Greek experience.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Like Behan's The Hostage, Romancero Gitan provided the composer with a contemporary voice of protest couched in a poetic text of great beauty, and just as The Hostage had immediate relevance to the Cyprus situation, the violent murder of Antonio Torres Heredia was a reminder of the brutalities committed by fascists in Spain and Greece. In the Spanish landscape of the Romancero - the whitewashed houses of 'Mort d'amor', the shining lemons, moons and oranges - the parallels with Greece were drawn still closer.

Although the foreign setting precludes the Lorca cycle from being as popular as Romiossini with his Greek audiences I cannot help liking it better than any of Theodorakis's song cycles. The characteristic Theodorakis motifs occur regularly but the melodies are more varied. Repeated notes of identical pitch are followed by the descending pattern of three in Antonio Heredia I, the same device is extended into a dramatic recitative in Antonio Heredia II, the lyric major melody with the major triad as a melodic bass that was used in the gay songs of The Hostage reappears in Death of Love. But just as The Hostage seemed to have captured an uncharacteristic wryness from its Irish text, so Romancero Gitan is infused with a definite Spanish flavour, apparent occasionally in melody, occasionally in rhythm.

There are three remarkably beautiful songs in the Lorca cycle. The finest is 'Pandermi', (Ballad of the Black Sorrow).(...) The long melisma on the word 'dawn' is simply the two devices Theodorakis noted in his analysis of the Palm Sunday Hymn, i.e. the three descending notes of the minor third and a decoration around the tonic. The third phrase echoes the second but a sudden leap of a minor sixth leads us to the climax of the opening section, again closing with the pattern of three descending notes and heralding the appearance of the tragic figure of Pandermi. The fourth melodic phrase closes on the tonic. It is followed by a new section where the melody rises sharply to the words 'Black gloom, her soul' and ends on a long drawn-out melisma on the word 'soul'. (...)

If ever there was a song for the voice of Maria Farandouri it is 'Pandermi'. She has recorded the Lorca songs with the Australian guitarist John Williams, whose filagreed accompaniments accentuate the Spanish character of the songs but lose some of the driving rhythm of the Greek popular orchestra.

The two lyrical major songs 'The Wind and the Beauty' and 'Death of Love' are only marginally inferior to 'Pandermi' in their melodic beauty and careful relation of word to melody. "The Wind and the Beauty' begins with an 11 bar melody built on four parallel two-bar phrases. In all of his composition Theodorakis has never produced a song of quite such delicate smoothness. It shines with the same silver light that delights the little gypsy girl, threatened by the 'unsleeping wind'.

'Death of Love' is distinguished by a surprising modulation frorm E major to D flat major for another moonlit scene... 'In the night, in the heat / The whitewashed walls shine'.

The two Antonio Torres Heredia songs — the arrest and the death — form a dramatic pair. The 'arrest' begins with four C's followed by a running passage of descending quavers. The same motif is repeated a tone higher in bars 17-20. It establishes a mood of urgency and boldness. A melodic phrase which occurs in 'Pandermi' gives the melody a brief resting place while the handsome lad stops, cuts lemons, throws them in the water and turns it golden. The urgency returns from the violent scene of the arrest. Antonio Torres Heredia II opens with a dramatic cry. The actual murder is described in a deceptively gay passage which slows to a climax in a cadence mirroring the opening phrase. It is a Heroic death. Antonio, outnumbered by police, fights to the death, his blood staining his crimson tie.

Theodorakis must have thought often of his triumphant song of death as he experienced the first horrors of dictatorship. He was convinced that a similar fate had been planned for him: to die a martyr's death for having spent his life writing about heroes.

© Gail Holst: Theodorakis. Myth & Politics in Modern Greek Music, 1980

Romancero Gitano: Poems in English | Lorca: Biography |Index