Program Notes – Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra

Concierto de Aranjuez for Guitar and Orchestra
Joaquin Rodrigo (1901–1999)
Written: 1939
Movements: Three
Style: Contemporary Spanish Nationalism
Duration: 22 minutes

Joaquin Rodrigo was born in the Spanish province of Valencia and was the youngest of ten children. A diphtheria epidemic caused him to lose his sight when he was only three. He received his first music lessons at the Valencia school for the blind when he was four, started studying piano and violin when he was eight years old, and turned to harmony and composition when he was sixteen. (Rodrigo had to write all of his music in Braille and then later dictate it to a copyist, a slow and laborious process.) Like many Spanish composers of the previous generation (most notably Manuel de Falla), Rodrigo went to Paris. There he studied with Paul Dukas (composer of the orchestral showpiece The Sorcerer’s Apprentice). After returning to Spain in 1939, he divided his time between composing and teaching music history at the University of Madrid.

Rodrigo wrote his most famous guitar concerto, the Concierto de Aranjuez, in 1939. Aranjuez is an old palace—called “the most beautiful and most cheerful of all the Spanish royal residences”—located between Toledo and Madrid. Rodrigo said that the concerto “is meant to sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the tree tops in its parks; it should be only as strong as a butterfly, and as dainty as a [flower] veronica.”

The first movement begins with the guitar playing alone, strumming out the underlying rhythm of the piece—an alternating two- and three-beat pattern. Soloist and orchestra then take turns at playing and ornamenting two themes. It ends as quietly as it began.

The English horn begins the second movement with a serene melody. The guitar repeats and ornaments the melody and then gives way to the English horn for the second half of the melody. The orchestra and guitar continue to trade leading roles until the guitar gets a solo cadenza. At the very end, the orchestra enters with a passionate restatement of the opening melody. The guitar ends the movement quietly.

Rodrigo describes the third movement as “a courtly dance in which the combination of duple and triple time maintains a taut tempo right to the closing bar.” The melody that the guitar plays at the beginning acts as the basis for the entire movement. Orchestra and soloist toss the theme to and fro, varying it all the while; and then, suddenly and very softly, the piece simply ends.

©2024 John P. Varineau