Project

The concert program includes two works by the composer Julen Ezkurra on texts by San Juan de la Cruz: ‘Vivo sin vivir’, belonging to ‘Coplas del Alma’ and various stanzas of the ‘Cántico Espiritual’.
‘Vivo sin vivir’ is a poem based on a composition that has mutated to the divine. Both Santa Teresa and San Juan bring their poetics closer to mystery, to the quest for life beyond death. The composer has chosen the text from San Juan de la Cruz.
The thematic orientation of the first part of the ‘Cántico Espiritual’ is the search for the beloved object, which still cannot reveal its presence, but leaves traces everywhere: in the forests, flowers, meadows, thickets… Nor can it be transmitted through language and can only be seen as a timid hint: ‘an I-don’t-know-what that is left babbling’. Inspired by the ‘Cantar de los Cantares’, it is a story of human love as a symbol of the divine love of Christ with his Church.
The second part of the concert begins with the interpretation of numbers 1, 2 and 3 of Frederic Mompou's first booklet of ‘Música callada’ by the pianist Alejandro Zabala. The composer wrote in the French edition of this work the following comment: ‘The great mystical poet San Juan de la Cruz sings in one of his beautiful poems: silent music, sonorous solitude. It is quite difficult to translate and express the true meaning of ‘Música callada’ without using the resource of the language, it is necessary to express the idea of a music that would be the very voice of silence, that is, that is silent as loneliness becomes music’. There lies the mystery, hearing that quiet voice that only speaks to the spirit and the silence that implies. That is the challenge: listen to the pauses to hear how silence sounds. Listen to it in our own soul. Resonances, dissonances of the same life. Music in its purest form.
This silent music gives way to the second part of the ‘Cántico Espiritual’, in which the appearance of the beloved object and its identification takes place. The universe of the Beloved can be perceived but not rationalized. The encounter between the beloved and the wife takes place. The stanza XXXVI, ‘Gocémonos Amado’, (which will end the concert) links the ‘Cántico Espiritual’ with the biblical metaphor of the hortus conclusus which, in this case, has left all contact with the outside to penetrate the symbolic dimension as an object, property of the husband and the wife.
To facilitate the understanding of the texts, the audience will have a hand program with the stanzas chosen by the composer on the verses of San Juan de la Cruz.

The concert will be performed by the Sine Nomine choir, various vocal soloists and the pianist Alejandro Zabala.

Programme

San Juan de la Cruz was born in Fontiveros, province of Ávila, around 1542 and died in Úbeda in 1591. San Juan is the most significant figure in Spanish mystical poetry and one of the best poets of our language despite the shortage of his work. He studied theology and was ordained a priest in 1567. He was a disciple, great friend and collaborator of Teresa de Jesús, with whom he undertook the reform of the Carmelite order, but the rivalries between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites took him to prison in Toledo in 1578. He then conceived the first thirty stanzas of his Canticle. The last ten were written in Baeza and Granada during the following years.
He considered poetry as a means for the expression of the ineffable, that is why his compositions are sometimes not very attainable. He fuses religious ecstasy, poetic inspiration, rich images and symbolism. His poetry has been interpreted over the centuries in multiple ways, but it has always garnered consensus as to its very high poetic value.
Focusing on the Canticle, it should be noted that there are two known versions of it: Canticle A that has 39 stanzas, and Canticle B, which came later and was reworked by the author for pedagogical purposes, which has one more stanza. Perhaps the existence of these two versions is one of the aspects of the Canticle that deserves greater mention, precisely because of the wide debate that was created around them and that is still not closed today. A part of the criticism considers that Canticle B is the one that has real value because it was modified by San Juan himself, while another sector believes that Canticle A is truly important because it is not subject to changes or explanations. This first version remains pure, as its author devised.
In this second line that supports Canticle A, Domingo Ynduráin is framed. What the editor comes to say is that, for him, the textual tradition of the Canticle is much more important without the explanatory notes because he considers that this second version is already a first philological noise, a contratext that hides the true essence of what the early Canticle is . These are notes that are not intended to explain the text from a literary point of view, not even religious or theological, but offer us an orthodox reading of it, which can make us suspect its illegitimate nature. We cannot forget that the Inquisition exerted great pressure on the literary authors, so that a text like the Canticle, without these later notes, could have been more than enough cause to take its author to jail or, even, to the death.
The work of San Juan de la Cruz is imbued with a great symbolist mysticism and has an agile rhythm. It is impregnated with the typical style of bucolic and pastoral poetry. Inspired by the Song of Songs attributed to Solomon, the Canticle is written based on lyres in which heptasyllables and hendecasyllables are alternated, endowing it with a deep musicality.
San Juan combines and integrates elements of the most different origins, which triggers the imagination in multiple directions at the same time, leaving the reader undecided and with a hesitant awareness of the criteria to follow to adapt these writings to one of the known and canonical models. It is an ambiguity that translates into a richness of references, simultaneous and multiple. That not only occurs in relation to the literary, but it also appears in the sense of a phrase or stanza considered in itself. His poems have traces of Garcilaso de la Vega and are scented with an Italianizing cultism.The Carmelite reformers collected thematic elements and formal schemes of the art of ‘glosar’ identified in the Castilian tradition of the XVI century. From these profane substrates of popular and troubadour tradition, a spiritualized poetry was derived. The Canticle is a story of human love as a symbol of the divine love of Christ's love with his Church.