Cuauhnáhuac (Revueltas)

Silvestre Revueltas in 1930

Cuauhnáhuac is an orchestral composition by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. It exists in three versions, the first for string orchestra, the other two for full orchestra with winds and percussion. The first version takes nearly 15 minutes to perform, while the third lasts only about 11 minutes.

History

In March 1925, Revueltas left Chicago and his wife of five years, Jule Klarasy, who stayed behind with their then three-year-old daughter Carmen. They were divorced in June 1927, by which time Revueltas had accepted a teaching post at the College of Music in San Antonio, Texas. There he met Aurora Murguía, the widow of Mexican revolutionary General Francisco Murguía, and they soon were living together. Late in1928, Revueltas received an invitation from Carlos Chávez offering him a position teaching violin and conducting the student Orchestra in the National Conservatory in Mexico City, as well as the post of Associate Conductor of Chávez's recently founded Orquesta Sinfónica Mexicana. Revueltas seized the opportunity and early in 1929 he and Aurora moved to Mexico City. It was at this time that Revueltas began composing in earnest, and the manuscript of one of his earliest large-scale compositions, the string-orchestra version of Cuauhnáhuac, is dedicated to Aurora (Parker 2002, 117, 119, 123–25, 129; Parker 2004, 182, 185, 190–91). He would also dedicate his Second String Quartet (Magueyes) (1931) to her (Baldassarre 2015, 464–65).

As in many other of his compositions, Revueltas composed several versions of Cuauhnáhuac. The first, for string orchestra, was written in June 1931 during a stay in Cuernavaca, the city from which it derives its name (Contreras Soto 2000, 35; Teibler-Vondrak 2011, 29n81). He then immediately set about rescoring it for full orchestra, in an unpublished version completed later in the same year. In the following year he created the third and final version, completing the new score in December 1932. This last version was premiered on 2 June 1933 by the Orquesta Sinfónica de México, conducted by the composer (Aktories and Kolb 1996, 2, 14; Estrada 2012, 54; Paraskevaídis 2011, 34; Slonimsky & 1945 249–50).

Instrumentation

Huehuetl (Indian drum)

The first version of Cuauhnáhuac was for string orchestra. The second version is unpublished and the scoring unknown. The third, published version is scored for a full orchestra of piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, E♭ clarinet, 2 B♭ clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (4 players: woodblock, bomba [or bass drum], 2 Indian drums, cymbals, xylophone, 2 tambourines, gong), and strings.

Programmatic content

Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca

"Cuauhnáhuac", a Nahuatl word meaning "near the forest" (from quauitl, "tree" and nauac or nahuac, "near"), was the name given by the Tlalhuicas, a people related ethnically to the Aztecs, to the capital of their province of Tlahuican. The name was deformed into Cuernavaca ("cow horn") by the invading Spanish in the 16th century. The Aztec emperor Moctezuma II is said to have had a country palace there, and when he was deposed by the conquistadores, their commander, Hernán Cortés, built a stone palacio on its main square after he had selected Cuernavaca to be an administrative seat for his massive, semiautonomous estate, the Marquisate of the Valley of Oaxaca. Although the town and its surrounding territories became a thriving mercantile area, home to a diverse population, Cuernavaca's municipal government was always staffed entirely by members of the local indigenous elite, all of whom claimed (rightly or wrongly) to be descendants of the elite class of the pre-conquest altepetl. The place has often been described as a "land of eternal spring" or "paradise" by nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers (Estrada 2012, 156; Haskett 2005, 5–6).

Revueltas provided a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the score: "This is a music without tourism. In the orchestra, the huehuetl (Indian drum) is used as a means of nationalist propaganda. Other instruments in the score are even more nationalistic, but no attention should be paid to them; it is all just anticapitalist agitation" (Slonimsky 1945, 248–49).

Analysis

Cuauhnáhuac employs a chromatic and dissonant idiom suggesting the primitivist folk-like style of early Stravinsky. This is achieved through the use of percussive, polyrhythmic relationships, ostinatos, and irregular metric successions (Antokoletz 2014, 194). The opening section blends the influence of Claude Debussy with that of Stravinsky (Estrada 2012, 156). Like many of Revueltas's single-movement works, it is cast in a tripartite form, in which the atonal opening character returns in the chromatic concluding part. In between comes a contrasting pentatonic middle section. Although it bears the markings of inspiration of Romanticism, its essentially dissonant character, produced by the superposition of different harmonic levels and a strong percussive background, show the emergence of a personal style of composition (Teibler-Vondrak 2011, 29–30). An rudimentary example of superposed harmonic levels occurs at rehearsal 45, where the winds and xylophone play a memorable gentle melody in E♭ major, accompanied by the cellos in G major (Palacio 1991).

The work is simple in overall form, but complex in the organization of its component sections (Dean 1992, 93). It is tripartite in structure, though the overriding aesthetic is one of continual change. Although the final section returns to the texture of the first and recapitulates some of its material, this is only used as a background for the introduction of seven new motives, another mestizo melody, and two more ostinatos. Given the amount of new material introduced, it would be more accurate to describe it as an ABC form than an ABA (Dean 1992, 102). The simultaneous presentation of different motivic material produces a pervasive, dissonant polytonality. Some of the motives are diatonic, some are pentatonic, others use the whole-tone scale, while the opening section uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale (Dean 1992, 103–104).

The middle section (b. 165–214) creates a strong contrast with what went before (and will come after) by turning to a tranquil mood and exclusively A-minor pentatonic material. This persistence of a single tonality is uncharacteristic for Revueltas's music, and may occur here in order to project more plainly the calmness of the Indian aspect of the work by avoiding complex rhythmic and tonal configurations, in contrast to the mestizo elements of the two outer sections (Dean 1992, 114–15).

Reception

By 1928, it had become clear that Mexican critics, performers, and the public favoured a musical nationalism based on popular rather than imagined pre-Columbian styles. When Chávez’s Indianist ballets El fuego nuevo (1921) and Los cuatro soles (1925) were first performed in 1928 and 1930, respectively, they were given a chilly if not hostile reception. Revueltas's Cuauhnáhuac fared better when it was premiered in 1933, due to its less obvious and rather parodic Indianist content (Saavedra 2009, 312).

Cuauhnáhuac is regarded as the work with which Revueltas began his most productive compositional phase, a composition which already displays the qualities that define his personal style (Teibler-Vondrak 2011, 30). It has been described as "a carefully constructed composition showing an inexhaustible melodic imagination and a masterful use of counterpoint" (Aktories and Kolb 1996, 2, 14), and praised for "the extraordinary vitality of all the voices, the striking contrasts of instrumental coloring, and the superposition of different harmonic planes" (Mayer-Serra 1941, 131). An especially admired trait is its instinctual quality, which enables Revueltas to invest the music "with fresh compositional intent, a primary character or dislocated cubism which, as collage, arises spontaneously in his work" (Estrada 2012, 156).

However, not all reception has been uncritically enthusiastic. When the score was first published, Henry Cowell found that, though it "bristles with unique and exciting sounds and the whole work has the attractiveness of original genius", he predicted its "scattered" form would prevent it from entering the standard repertory, even if it might often be played as "an amusing novelty". He found the mixture of Central American Indian culture with a European modernistic style "rather awkward", and the ending "so incongruous as to turn the whole thing into a joke, amusing enough, but leaving, if not a rather bad taste in the ear, at least an unpleasant sound in the mouth" (Cowell 1946, 107–108).

Discography

String-orchestra version

Full-orchestra version

References

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