Architecture and Music around the Alhambra. Reminiscences of a dreamlike world: La Puerta del Vino (Debussy)

Abstract

Orientalism, as a variant of exoticism in the Romantic period, adopted a series of topics linked to distant countries and oriental cultures, including Spanish lands, especially Andalusian. This phenomenon was especially prolific in the world of the arts around the Alhambra, «doubly romantic for its medieval and oriental origin» (Raquejo, 1989).Alhambrism was developed by traveling writers in the early 19th century, eager for suggestive scenarios in which to recreate their poems and stories. Later it spread to the plastic arts, with painters such as François Antoine Bossuet, John Frederick Lewis, David Roberts, Gustave Doré or Jenaro Pérez Villaamil. In the case of architecture, Alhambrism was nourished by parallel sources. On the one hand, the awakening to the conservation of the Alhambra as a monument witness to a dreamy period in the history of Spain, and the first interventions by Rafael Contreras, still under babbling and unscientific criteria. On the other hand, the impulse to decorativism through the seminal studies of Owen Jones and Jules Goury, convinced that «in the Alhambra the exemplary paradigm of the most perfect ornamental and chromatic system of all historical styles had existed was hidden» (Villafranca).Music also found fertile ground for creativity in the Alhambra between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, within the nationalist romantic movement. However, it was mainly the Spanish composers who chose the Alhambra to reflect the national identity: Tárrega, Turina, Albéniz, Bretón, De Monasterio, to which we should add a Debussy influenced by Falla.The communication aims ultimately to investigate through analysis the musical resources used by the last-mentioned composer, Claude Debussy, to evoke with sounds the architecture and the sensual atmosphere of the Alhambra in one of the most representative works of Alhambrism in music: La Puerta del Vino (The Wine Gate).