Nights in the Gardens of Spain

Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a set of nocturnes for piano and orchestra by Manuel de Falla. Almost but not quite a piano concerto, it treats the keyboard instrument as a member of the orchestra rather than making a soloist of it. The piece premiered in 1916.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain is Falla’s first strictly orchestral piece, produced after he had spent a decade writing stage music and chamber works. While working on Nights in the Gardens of Spain, Falla had completed the ballet El amor brujo, heard most often in the 21st century as an orchestral suite. Both pieces were strongly flavoured with Spanish rhythms and effects. Nights in the Gardens of Spain also showed the influence of Maurice Ravel, who had befriended the Spanish composer during Falla’s extended musical sojourns in Paris. Ravel had himself written several Spanish-flavoured works for orchestra and for piano. Falla set out to see what he could produce in the same vein.

Many of the rhythms of Nights in the Gardens of Spain derive from the folk music of Andalusia, where Falla was born. Because Andalusia forms the southernmost region of Spain, it was a crossroads of many cultures and hence yielded a rich and exotic musical style.

Falla determined to present a sequence of three nocturnes portraying nightlike scenes and titled each movement to suggest what had inspired him. He later asserted that

The end for which it was written is no other than to evoke places, sensations, and sentiments.… The music has no pretensions to being descriptive. It is merely expressive.

In the first movement, “At the Generalife,” Falla refers to the hillside gardens near the Moorish Alhambra palace complex in Granada. The second movement, “Distant Dance,” conjures less a specific site than the passion and intensity of flamenco; the second movement leads without pause into the third, “In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba.” The final movement recalls the Moorish-influenced gardens near ancient Córdoba.