Word: atlantida
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...Falla never stopped working, and the years of silence were filled with a dream-"to glorify the immortality of Spain through music." Last week, at Milan's La Scala, the grand dream came to life at the premiere of Falla's four-hour-long scenic cantata La Atlantida...
Falla conceived of La Atlantida as his life's masterwork. a Spanish Parsifal, throbbing with epic Wagnerian themes and massive Wagnerian thunder. He took his title and story from the Catalonian epic by Jacinto Verdaguer-a tale of the lost continent of Atlantis, destroyed for its sins, and of Spain preserved to export Christianity to the New World...
...Scala, under the baton of U.S. Conductor Thomas Schippers, La Atlantida proved to be a grandiose but admirably controlled work that made its points with much of the concision that Falla displayed in such earlier compositions as The Three-Cornered Hat. Where Falla departed from his familiar style was in the sparing use of folk material and in the skillful use of a descriptive chorus. Atlantida has only three major singing roles: Narrator Corifeo (Baritone Lino Puglisi), Queen Pyrene (Mezzo Giulietta Simionato), and Queen Isabella (Soprano Teresa Stratas). Much of the action is either pantomime or dancing...
...Franco government won, and De Falla's sister Maria hustled back to Spain with a sackful of his belongings. Since then, she has lived in seclusion with her surviving brother German in the sleepy Andalusian village of San Fernando, jealously guarding a shabby bag which contains La Atlantida-comp-leted down to the last note...
...explanations. The prosaic one insisted that Maria was hanging on to Manuel's last music because she and German were quarreling about minor details of Manuel's will. The more poetic theory: just before his death, Manuel had told Maria that the role of God in La Atlantida must be sung by one who was absolutely pure in heart and María, now a wrinkled, white-haired 62, felt that there is no such man in the world today...