Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (Adagio) and Picasso’s Guernica

Music as fragile as a butterfly and as precise as a matador’s pass. A minor chord, or a chord spiced with dissonance, on a strummed guitar. An English horn weaves what Rodrigo wept in his piano night of lost children.* (Again and again his wife, Victoria, reports.) A solo guitar takes over the lament, adds flamenco-inspired ornaments and turns like whips of a matador’s cape. Picasso’s bull of death is everywhere. Incendiary bombs, flames. A mother holding her dead child as Mary holds the dead Christ in Michelangelo’s Pieta. She wrenches her face upwards towards Picasso’s Franco-Hitler bull of all-seeing, uncaring, distorted eyes. The guitar’s cadenza with its rising rasgueado chords like any mother’s rising, unheard screams. Over a thousand innocents dead. A guitar’s delicate notes higher and higher, softer and softer. Another child, a soul, drifts toward heaven.

*Joaquin Rodrigo and his wife, Victoria, lost a child due to the miscarriage about the same time Picasso’s Guernica was created.

Performance of the Adagio Movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez. John Williams is the guitarist.

Image of tiled wall mosaic of Guernica from photograph by Papamanila from wikimedia commons

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