Falla then rearranged the work, expanding the instrumentation and revising the scenario for performance in 1916 (on the program with the premiere of Nights in the Gardens of Spain). The music was generally well received, some grumblings about French influence notwithstanding, but the production was not notably successful. Gregorio Martínez Sierra and María Lejárraga, with whom Falla was involved in several projects, wrote the scenario and texts, and the piece had its premiere at the Teatro Lara in Madrid in April 1915. (“Love, the Magician” is how the work is usually translated into English, but brujo can be an adjective as well as a noun, and “Love Bewitched” might be a closer idea.) The work was requested by the great dancer Pastora Imperio, whose mother, Rosario la Mejorana, suggested an old Andalusian legend for the subject. His first work back in Madrid was El amor brujo, in its original form a gitanería of dances, songs, and spoken texts. It was the two-act opera La vida breve that served as his introduction in Paris, and the sounds of his homeland were never long out of Falla’s creative imagination the principal work of his Paris years was the Siete canciones populares españolas.įalla left Paris at the beginning of World War I. Moreover, the majority of his most important scores are music for the theater - zarzuelas, ballets, operas, incidental music. Orchestration: 2 flutes (2nd = piccolo), oboe (= English horn), 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, bells, piano, and stringsįirst Los Angeles Philharmonic performance (complete score): February 13, 1930, with contralto Mina Hager, Artur Rodzinski conductingĪlthough Falla owed much to a formative sojourn in Paris, where he learned from colleagues such as Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas, his music remained firmly rooted in Spanish arts, both folk and classical.

El brujo in english