If paintings could sing
Los Bufones explores the world of Velázquez
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os Bufones, a new work by the Santa Fe-based composer Ron Strauss, will be unveiled in a four-performance run beginning this Thursday, Jan. 19, and the first question one might reasonably ask is what its genre is. His score calls it “a song cycle for the theatre” and his website expands that to “an operatic song cycle for the theatre.” The heading on the work’s printed libretto seems more noncommittal in its ambiguity about genre. There he calls it a cosita, a “little thing” — more specifically, a “Cosita for the Theatre (with Music) Based on the Jester Portraits of Velázquez.”
“Originally I was thinking of just doing a concert piece, 40 or 50 minutes, for just six voices and piano,” Strauss told Pasatiempo. Each of the singers would portray a different character famous from the canvases of Diego Velázquez, painter to the court of Philip IV during the Golden Age of 17th-century Spain. The characters would not be the lofty nobles of Philip’s circle, but rather the jesters and dwarfs — the so-called bufones — who invest the paintings with an unusual degree of humanity and a sense of the enigmatic. “The songs would be what these bufones would sing at a court entertainment.”
But then a practical problem arose: Those songs would fill half of a concert nicely, but what would the remainder of such a program be? Someone floated the idea that Velázquez himself might appear as a character in some story involving the bufones, but Strauss shied away from that on the grounds that it would demand more of a plot than he wanted to get involved with. In the end, the first half is pretty much the song cycle he had envisioned from the outset, although the piano accompaniment has now been enlarged to involve a trio of violin, cello, and piano. Each of the songs offers “a portrait in a monologue,” introducing a half-dozen figures sprung to life from Velázquez’s paintings: Pablo de Valladolid, one of Philip’s jesters; Don Sebastián de Morra, a dwarf acquired to be a companion for the king’s son; Nicolasito, an Italian dwarf given to Philip’s wife; Don Juan de Austria, one of the court’s chief jesters; Don Diego de Acedo, a dwarf-jester who also served as keeper of the king’s seal; and Maribárbola, a German dwarf who was tutor to the king’s daughter. After intermission, all of these characters join to present a court entertainment titled “Songs at a Banquet.”
During the Golden Age, such festivities might have involved numbers portraying gods or figures from classical mythology, often understood to be allegories of facets of the king himself. An undercurrent of indirect meaning also inhabits Strauss’ piece. “They’re really embroiled in this courtly world. Several people have commented that it seems so timely, in a way. Here they are in this political situation they don’t necessarily approve of, but they’re pretty much stuck in it. Their songs [include] some satirical commentary on human foibles, the seven deadly sins, things that always trip up everybody. They refer to people in the court, to the king, but always obliquely, always masked. That’s what I imagine you would sing in a situation like that; you refer to, or act out greed or compassion, to give those [in power] some options to going full tilt on their rotten way.”
Strauss has been intrigued by the art of Velázquez for a long time. “I wrote a piece based on some of his paintings in the late 1980s, a couple of years after I came here to Santa Fe. It was a duet for harp and guitar. I didn’t feel right naming the piece specifically after Velázquez, but I was definitely thinking about the palace of the Alcázar, the king, his children, his wife, the people in the court. Not many painters do that for me.” He grew fascinated by the artist’s works, which he knew only from reproductions in books until he finally traveled to Madrid two years ago and saw the Velázquez paintings displayed in the Prado. By that time he had already composed Los Bufones. “It was like meeting a pen pal,” he said. “Las Meninas —Ihadno idea of its size and how it was done. The same with the portraits of Don Sebastián and Don Diego — those two speak to me a lot. Those people are still ‘alive’ when you see the paintings.”
Although he has done a good deal of reading about the artist and the history of Philip’s court, Strauss has come to accept that facts are relatively scarce about Velázquez as well as the dwarfs and jesters. That freed him to invent details and situations. In fact, not all of the characters he portrayed overlapped in real life; he refers to Los Bufones as “my fiction of time-space at the court of Philip IV.” His invented back stories helped fuel his decisions as a composer. “Nicolasito — he’s the boy on the far right of Las Meninas, with his foot on the dog. His real name was Nicolas Pertusato, that being the name of a cape at the southern tip of Italy. Mariana of Austria picked him up while she was on her way to Madrid to marry Philip. I thought that if he came from Italy I might start his music with an Italianate theme, like something Rossini might have sketched, a little gesture. That’s his theme song. His mind kind of wanders in his song, but he keeps coming back to that Rossini theme. Maybe he remembers it as a lullaby.”
Strauss wrote the libretto in English, but from the beginning he intended for the piece to performed in Spanish, which seemed essential for a work about the court of Madrid. The libretto was translated by María Cristina López into the version that will be sung, but the English texts will be projected for the benefit of those whose Spanish, like Strauss’, is limited to a fleeting high-school acquaintance. “The piece had humble origins, but it has become a big deal.” It will be given in what he describes as a “mildy theatricalized concert staging” with direction by Jean Moss and costumes by Cheryl Odom that are based on the outfits depicted in the paintings. The performances take place at Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center, but it is being co-produced by Santa Fe’s Teatro Paraguas. Word on the street is that all concerned would like to follow up with a run in Santa Fe, but as things now stand that is in the realm of hopes and dreams. For the moment, the court of Philip IV remains an hour away — not an onerous detour to witness a royal banquet that, as the dwarf Don Sebastián sings, promises to be “an engaging amusement as well as a pleasant aid to your digestion.”