Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show as a musical and literary construction of the Spanish national identity

Abstract

The importance of Cervantes and Don Quixote as representative icons of a Spanish national identity developed and grew enormously during the XIXth and early XXth centuries, with the rise of nationalisms. The concept of intrahistoria as the cultural history of a people, its true history, guides various writings where regenerationist proposals are advanced, such as Unamuno’s Life of Don Quixote and Sancho or Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Quixote. I consider that, similarly, Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppets Show posits its own proposal for Spain through a dialogue between music and literature. Falla believes that Cervantes’ work (especially Don Quixote) encloses a magnificent representation of the eternal soul of Spain (in the words of the composer himself). Through the joint analysis of the libretto, the staging and the score, we can see the kind of reading that Falla is doing of Don Quixote and the kind of political discourse underlying that reading.