Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcalá de Henares, c. 1547 or 29 September 1547; Madrid, 22 April 1616) was one of the great writers of the Spanish Golden Age. He also matters to the history of music, because his works record Spanish folk songs and dances of his time with great precision, and because they inspired numerous composers from the seventeenth century onwards.

He was brought up in Valladolid, Seville and Madrid. Around 1569 he travelled to Rome in the service of Cardinal Acquaviva and later distinguished himself as a soldier, being wounded at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. In 1575 he was captured by corsairs and taken as a slave to Algiers, where he remained a captive for five years, until 1580. Back in Spain, his marriage was unhappy, he had problems with the law over his accounts, and he was imprisoned on several occasions. Despite the success of Don Quixote (1605-1615), he lived in straitened circumstances until his death.

As regards music, the scholars Roda, Salazar and Querol agree that the descriptions of songs and, above all, of folk dances in his plays, novels and Don Quixote are based on direct observation. There is less agreement about Roda's view that the melodies cited were exclusive to his own era and had no connection with songbooks predating 1550. Querol saw in these references an almost deliberate effort to preserve an unbroken Spanish tradition, but the evidence suggests that Cervantes had in mind a new kind of music, distinct from the romances and villancicos of earlier collections. According to Salazar, he lacked great musical expertise and tended to allude to instruments in a vague way, as was customary in pastoral literature.

Cervantes's musical legacy is extensive. Don Quixote alone has served as the basis for more than one hundred pieces. Among the earliest are an anonymous Ballet de Don Quichot, performed nine years after the publication of the first part, and the opera Il Don Chisciot della Mancia by Carlo Sajon, probably first performed in Venice in 1680. In the eighteenth century Las bodas de Camacho (1784) by Pablo Esteve y Grimau appears, the first Spanish opera on the subject. Composers such as Massenet, Donizetti, Falla and Ernesto Halffter also drew on its episodes, and Ravel and Ibert wrote songs inspired by the character. His influence endures as one of the most fruitful literary sources for European music.