Presentation

In Granada, approximately between the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century and the middle of the third, a crucial part of what historian Juan Marichal called "the universalization of Spain" takes shape: a dual movement of expansion and reception, radiating influence and learning. The best of Spain’s cultural tradition projects outward, overcoming the dual barriers of ignorance and stereotype, and rising above centuries of isolation; At the same time, the finest influences from those previously inaccessible worlds reach our culture, enriching and inspiring it.

These are the years when Granada imagined «La vida breve» and «El amor brujo» of Falla that dazzles many in Paris, and «Noches en los jardines de España» takes its place in the most demanding circles of new music. In Granada, the meeting of innovation and tradition reaches its peak. Falla delves into the roots of Cante Jondo while simultaneously making a leap into modernity that carries him at least as far as Stravinsky’s Petrouchka or «L’Histoire du Soldat».

When «El retablo de maese Pedro» premiered in Paris, its success was an international recognition of the secret developments taking shape in Granada, within the intimate scale of a city introspectively focused on itself, yet simultaneously opening to the world. It is the Granada of the 1923 Fiesta de Reyes or Celebration of Kings at the García Lorca family home and of the puppet workshop of the great Hermenegildo Lanz—unfortunate and almost unknown to posterity—creator of puppets eerily similar to those Paul Klee was making at the same time in the Bauhaus. Granada astonishes many in the universality of what is created within it and what the imaginations of those who have never visited it project upon it. A pastel-colored postcard of the Alhambra's Puerta del Vino, sent to Paris by Manuel de Falla, was enough for Debussy to compose one of his mysterious preludes dedicated to it. To listen to it is to return to Granada for those who are absent and to glimpse the city for those who do not know it. Granada is a real city, and it is also a place of imagination.

Music crowned this outpouring of creative enthusiasm. Returning to the best of that time is a way of reconnecting with the finest aspects of the past and embracing the most generous possibilities of the future. Falla and Lorca equally loved the tradition of folk songs and the disruptive music that demanded new ears to be fully appreciated. They knew how to work on both a small scale and an immense one. In their daily work and ambition to achieve the perfection demanded by another exemplary visitor, Juan Ramón Jiménez—"Better to be great and perfect"—those Granadans rose to the highest dreams the city inspired. Throughout all of Europe, and in the cultured Americas of Buenos Aires and New York, the universality of their Granadan sensibilities resounded.

The Granada Festival of Music and Dance was born in the Alhambra to preserve and transmit that legacy, reinforcing the bond between the imaginary and real city, between the popular and high culture of Andalusia, and the vast heritage of European musical tradition.