Romantic Spain and an exceptional music score. Coriolano by Francisco Andreví

Abstract

When the 250^th anniversary of the birth of the immeasurable Ludwig van Beethoven, author of a famous Coriolan Overture, Op. 62 in C minor (Ouvertüre zu Coriolan) is celebrated, the opportunity has been raised to publicize the work here, of the same name, written by Francisco Andreví (*1786; †1853), who was master of the Spanish Royal Chapel between 1830 and 1836, that is, with the Bourbon king Ferdinand vii of Spain, and during the first years of the regency of Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies. A composer later released in Bordeaux and Paris, this is the only work by this Catalan musician known today for the scene, which has been preserved in a single handwritten copy. A music, without a doubt, conditioned by the complex political situation of the moment in the Spanish court, which reveals the lights and shadows of a type of composition “of circumstances” and “of consumption”, steeped in Italian operatic literature at the time in vogue ―and because of its reflection in France― (Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer), here very second-rate, although with brief flashes, sometimes brilliant, although above all and mainly shocking, which are only a testimony, striking, and perhaps paradigmatic, of what could have been and what it ended up becoming, the music of a nation in full dismantling. See here the score edition of the aforementioned composition, which is accompanied by an extensive study, to which reference is made.