There are moments in life that are unrepeatable, there are places that are irreplaceable, there are people who mark our lives forever, becoming indispensable, eternally forming part of our personality. We can all remember moments similar to the one I am going to discuss in this article; we all have memories that will never leave our minds. There was a moment in my life that will remain forever etched in my memory: I am referring to the day the curtain fell on the Teatro Carlo Felice, The Genoa Opera, once the world premiere of the film has concluded Fuenteovejuna Ballet, after ten months of intense and exciting work.
I met Antonio gades in his Madrid home, two hours after receiving the providential call from my “brother” Maurice Sotelo. With his deep and always brotherly voice he said to me: Fausto (that's what he's called me, all my life), I'm at Antonio Gades's house, come here right away. At that moment he was writing one of the fifty book-discs that came out on the market with the title Great music step by step, which edited the International Book Club, which, by the way, was translated into nine languages without my permission and sold more than ten million copies worldwide, without me having received any royalties. What a rip-off they got me. I hesitated for a moment whether to go or not because the publisher was in a hurry to deliver the books; it was Sunday and Mondays were shipping days. Thank goodness I thought: damn! Antonio Gades? The genius from Alicante raised in Madrid was one of my idols, although I had never met him in person nor had I ever seen him dance live, I only knew him from the films of Saura, Blood Wedding, Witchy Love and especially Carmen, who had impressed me so much during my Viennese years. I took the scooter I had outside my house (I lived at 74 San Bernardo Street back then) and headed full speed ahead to Plaza de Castilla, where Antonio lived. He needed a folklore expert for what was going to be his final work, and Sotelo thought I was ideal. It was love at first sight.
Gades commented on his plans for the music of Fuenteovejuna and he made continuous references to his previous works, and I, trying to win him over, said: yes, like you do at this moment of Bodas de sangre, yes, like that moment in CarmenI wanted to impress him so he'd realize I knew his work like the back of my hand; I truly knew every hidden detail about the music. Antonio hired me that same day, and we started working right away.
My job was to look for music to be danced and sung in the ballet based on a script that had previously been designed by the Jerez writer. José Manuel Caballero BonaldWe met every day from that March of 1994, including Saturdays and Sundays, in ten-hour sessions, exchanging opinions on the details of each scene. I was thrilled, experiencing how this genius shared his creative work with me and, without hesitation, suggested musical tempos, melodies, and musical genres.
After a month I told him that to do my job well I needed to go for a week to Urueña, where the great Joaquin Diaz He had a folklore library, the most complete I knew of. I booked a guesthouse in the small town of Valladolid, which incidentally has the most bookstores per capita in the world. and I settled into Joaquín Díaz's library, who welcomed me with open arms, with a small cassette recorder and the songbooks that the maestro keeps in his library. I was looking for music for the different scenes, for the laundry room, because there I found the ideal song, for that scene that ultimately became one of the high points of the play. A jota was needed, because there were a thousand jotas. And so, at the end of that week I returned to Madrid with a large amount of music recorded on that cassette, humming along to the scores and a notebook full of notes. Now I was ready to give Antonio what he needed; I had the script in my hands, and I knew what he needed.
"When the curtain fell for the last time, after ten months of intense work and without having said a word to me in that time, not even a simple pat on the back, before we each went to our dressing rooms, Antonio Gades approached me and said: we did it! Mission accomplished. He was a true guerrilla fighter."
When summer came, Antonio finished the script at the house of the Dr. Barros In Udra, a village near Grove, in my Galician homeland, where Antonio, Pepe Caballero, and I went. Those days were also unforgettable. I, a humble musicologist from Vigo, with those two giants.
Antonio began calling his team of people, singers and dancers he would be working with, and auditions were held for the dance troupe. Once the company was formed, he called Juanjo Linares, who was the most prestigious expert in traditional dances, and was the one who suggested some numbers for Fuenteovejuna, such as Algodre's bolero, the serrana del caldero, which were included in the ballet and I adapted them to Antonio's choreographic needs.
In all those months, Antonio never said to me, "Good, Faustino," or "That's nice, thank you." Nothing, as dry as a jerky. Gades was a cultural worker, as he liked to be called, and I, well, was another, and the two of us were making the music step by step. One day he even brought me a cello and said: play, bastard. I had told him I was a cellist, but that I was very bad, which is true, but he got a cello and put it in my hand, and that same day while I was playing in the studio and Jacko, who was the sound technician, sat down at a keyboard and we did three scenes right there. All of it was played badly by me, by the way, to the point that when we recorded the work in the studio, since much of the ballet's music sounds recorded, I called a cellist to record those three pieces correctly and, to my surprise, when I showed them to him, Antonio said to me: No, no, no, I want the ones you played, I don't want them well played, I want them just as they were.. Which are the ones that sound today in Fuenteovejuna.
We went into the recording studio that was behind Antonio's dance studio, next to the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, and we were recording there for a month. All the dancers and all the flamencoWe locked ourselves away for a month recording in order to finally put together the tape that would later be played in theaters. At that time, ProTools didn't exist yet, and of course, all the connections for each piece were made by cutting the tape and splicing it together with tape. Two days before the premiere, we went to Genoa. I left the recording studio early the day of the trip, finishing the tape an hour early, which meant the piece hadn't really been rehearsed in its entirety.
We arrived at the beautiful Genoa theater, the lights came up, an eight-hour session, and finally the entire show was done. It was a tremendous success. As always, a half-hour of choreographed bows. When the curtain fell for the last time, after ten months of intense work and without having said a word to me in that time, not even a simple pat of encouragement, before we each went to our dressing rooms, Antonio approached me and said: "We did it!" Mission accomplished. He was a true guerrilla fighter. The things.
