Railway and Arts: 2014

dijous, 2 d’octubre del 2014

Piano suite from Madrid to Aranjuez

In 1989, the staff of Madrid Railway Museum discovered in an antique shop a score for piano entitled El Camino de Madrid to Aranjuez by Hippolytus Gondois. It waspublished in 1851in the press of Casimiro Martin. It was a suite with the following numbers:

Locomotive - Grand galop
Madrid, the pier - Polka
Getafe, first station - Polka
Pinto, second station - Polka schotis
Valdemoro, third station - Polka schotis
Ciempozuelos, fourth station - Polka mazurka
Aranjuez, the landing - Polka mazurka

The finding was picked up by the music magazine Scherzo, indicating that the musicologist Francisco Asenjo Barbieri Gondois cites Gondois as author of operettas and the fellow scholar José Subirá cites him as a conductor. The finding was also picked up by the Spanush newspaper ABC in an article by Leopoldo Hontañón. The same year of its discovery, the suite was recorded by the pianist Raquel Martín Moreno.

In the accompanying study, Luis Fernando Carvajal descrives this work as "lounge music", frivolous and carefree, which was fond of Queen Isabel II, and indicates:

One of the composers who was favored by the Royal Family was Hipólito Gondois. The activity of our illustrious forgotten develops between Barcelona and Madrid, alternating composition with conducting. Unfortunately few details we know about him, but from the application of a musician in the Royal Chapel of Isabel II can draw a sketch, not personal, but musical. In view of such a request, we know Gondois was "composer of the Academy of Paris" and director of the orchestras of two Madrid theaters.

The record case is illustrated with an engraving that represents the opening ceremony of the railroad from Madrid to Aranjuez by Queen Isabel II on February 9, 1851.

So the first movement of the suite sounds like this:

Railway and Arts

Since its inception, the railroad has kept the interest of the artists. John C. Bourne represented in his prints and drawings the enormous engineering work of the first British lines and painters such as Gustave Caillebotte or Dario Regoyos captured in their canvas European landscape transformed by the new method of transportation. The novelists, from Tolstoy to Zola, from Dickens to Oller, used the railroad as a setting in their works. The poets, such as William Wordsworth and Melchor de Palau, glossed the changes that the railroad caused in lives and property. The cinema, from its first frames, took it as a stage and protagonist. The music has found in the rattle of the train the basis for their workers popular songs, the patterns of Winton Marsalis jazz and the basis for the symphonic works by Arthur Honegger. The illustration and poster have produced memorable works to promote certain routes. This tradition has not been broken, survives in graphic novels, movies, sculptures and railway themed poster and, more recently, in electronic art and video games. All that is the subject of this blog.