Finally, in the vestry of the monastery Don Pedro showed me that row of eight masterpieces painted by Francisco Zurbarán; if one does not see his work in this room one misses his talent. His commission was one of those ordinary jobs which have defeated so many good painters: ‘Portraits of the leading friars in the history of this monastery.’ The Hieronymites chosen were all of advanced age and position, mostly bald, and of monotonous history, but what Zurbarán accomplished with them is well-nigh miraculous, for the tall, powerful paintings unfold with a richness of style and imagination that one would never expect if he knew only Zurbarán’s lesser work. The fine series impressed me as something that might have been done by Domenico Ghirlandaio, for though Zurbarán lived from 1598 to 1664, he painted with the style of an earlier age.
For me, the apex of the series was the third picture on the left-hand wall; it showed Zurbarán at his best. It was a portrait of Father Illescas, a political priest who ruled Guadalupe and later Córdoba. His cluttered desk provided an opportunity for one of Zurbarán’s great still lifes; the figure of the Hieronymite became the occasion for a splendid hard-edge portrait of uncompromising intensity; the De Hooch-like scene beyond the pillars shows the entrance to the monastery with a friar at the door dispensing alms to beggars in a style recalling the best work of Giovanni Bellini. If this magnificent work were housed where large numbers of people visited, it would be an acknowledged masterpiece. It excels its seven companions only in the excellence of its parts and the variation shown therein. As a straight piece of painting I rather preferred the simpler picture of Father Yáñez, founder of the monastery, as he kneels before King Enrique III, who bestows upon him the biretta of Bishop of Toledo. It is uncluttered, direct and powerful. Spanish critics are amused by the fact that King Enrique, who ruled 1390–1406, is dressed in the costume of King Felipe III, who ruled 1598–1621. The courtier who looks out from the background is supposed to be a self-portrait of Zurbarán, and I wish this work were located in some capital city where I might see it more often.
One of the reasons why it is so rewarding to see the Zurbaráns in Guadalupe is that the vestry where they hang is a magnificent room well suited to the display of tall canvases. The walls are white and gold; the richly ornamented ceiling is studded with windows that admit good light; and the altarpiece of an attached chapel has a heavy ornateness that glistens. It is sometimes difficult for a foreigner to believe old accounts of how wealthy the religious buildings of Spain once were, but a visit to Guadalupe corrects that.
‘But the thing to remember about this room,’ says the mayor as we leave, ‘is that lamp suspended from the ceiling.’ He points to a huge bronze brazier of Oriental design, suspended on a fine chain. ‘It was brought here,’ the mayor explains, ‘by Don Juan of Austria after the Virgin gave him victory at the Battle of Lepanto. Captured from a Turkish galleon. The point is, we Spaniards fought to attain buildings like this … rooms like this.’
From Guadalupe I went north over the Gredos Mountains to the walled city of Avila, judged by most people to be the finest medieval remnant in Spain. From any approach it is a handsome sight, perched on a hill with a river nearby and massive walls enclosing it. The gates of Avila look as if horsemen might clatter out through the portcullis, and I was fortunate on my first visit to enter the city along with a wedding party that had engaged a band. It was lunchtime and we were headed for the same restaurant near the walls of the city. It was very old, with low-ceilinged rooms and open rafters, and the food was heavy. The wedding party sang, and by the time everyone was half-drunk I could not tell what century this group belonged to. In 1300 they would have looked much the same, and in 1500, too. They were the perennial farmers of Spain come to town for a celebration, and it was a noisy, delightful day. I was invited to toast the bride in a harsh red wine that went well with the roast pig we were eating, and when I left I was given a boisterous farewell. Down in the streets of Avila the noise of the celebration followed me and I could imagine a watchman of some previous age clomping along and crying to the inn, ‘Ho, there! Silence! Honest men want to sleep.’ It was going to be some time before there was silence.
Most visitors who come to Avila do so to pay homage to a remarkable woman whose piety made the city famous; almost none come to seek out the musician whose genius I had discovered by accident and who now meant so much to me. The woman was Santa Teresa de Avila (1515–1582), foremost of the Spanish mystics and a writer of distinction. She was born of a good family and at the age of eighteen unexpectedly announced her intention of joining a convent, where she led a prosaic life marked mainly by a lively social life which she maintained with the leading families in the area, but at the age of forty she chanced to see a statue of Christ that had been left accidentally in her path and in a moment of divine inspiration she saw through to the reality of God. From that time on she became increasingly concerned with the mystical path to religious insight, retaining, however, the hard practicality of her upbringing. She sought Papal permission to reform the lax order of which she was a member and launched the Discalced (Shoeless; that is, they wore sandals) Carmelites as opposed to the traditional Calced Carmelites, who wore shoes. Her practical mind made her an excellent administrator, and before long she established branches of her reformed order in different parts of Spain including two monasteries for men, but at the same time her spiritual life intensified, enabling her to write a series of books which constitute the classic statement of mysticism.
When she was fifty-two she met in Medina del Campo a young priest with whom her spiritual life would henceforth be linked, and their relationship forms one of the gentlest episodes of Spanish history. Juan de Yepis y Alvarez (1542–1591), twenty-seven years younger than Teresa, was the son of very poor parents. His father died early and his widowed mother took her brood to Arévalo and then to Medina, where Juan served as male nurse in a paupers’ hospital. His close contact with misery bred two results: he took vows as a Carmelite and he entertained those first mystical visions which were to characterize his life. Like other great Spaniards he attended the University of Salamanca, where at the age of twenty-five he was ordained a priest. After brief service he met for the first time Teresa de Avila, whose fame filled the countryside. Judging from externals, no one could have predicted that this fashionable, witty nun from a fine family would find in Juan de Yepis, a retiring young priest from an underprivileged family, a bond of identity, but that is what happehed. The English religious expert, F. Trueman Dicken, calls their friendship ‘one of the most fecund of all Christian relationships since the time of the Apostles.’ In Teresa’s fight to defend her Discalced Carmelites, Juan became a bold champion, and as a result spent a long confinement in Toledo jail, where his exceptional gift for poetry manifested itself. When he left the prison he was a major poet, a lyricist of the darker moods of the spirit; the title of one of his outcries has become almost a theme song of modern confusion, ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’:
On a dark night,
inflamed with love’s desires,
oh sweet happiness,
I went forth unnoticed
when my house was already asleep.
In the dark night Juan found the beginning of his mystical understanding, which drew him even closer to Teresa. During one five-year period he served as confessor to the convent in Avila, headed by Teresa, and for three of those years she was in residence, so that the two mystics were able to conduct long discussions which deepened the spiritual life of each. It was this period of shared ideas that led to the richest literary results; of her experience with Juan’s sharp mind Teresa said, ‘He is my little Seneca.’
Teresa lived to be sixty-seven; Juan died at forty-nine, as if he felt it unprofitable to continue without the presence of his mentor. Together they bore the moves made against them by the Church and the persecutions initiated by monasteries and convents that did not want to be reformed. Each suffered severe discipline and even the threat of investigation by the Inquisition, but whe
n they were dead, persons who knew them began to realize that in Teresa of Avila and Juan de Yepis, now known as Juan de la Cruz, this wall-girt town had produced two saints whose miracles stemmed from their close acquaintanceship with God. Teresa attained sainthood first in 1622, Juan in 1726, and they live today as the twin glories of Avila. In the fall of 1967 Pope Paul VI announced that henceforth Santa Teresa would be considered as one of the doctors of the Church. Prior to this, there had been no woman so honored.
To Spain mysticism is as natural as the olive tree, but here it avoids both the mysterious excess and the delirious rapture of eastern mysticism. It is a practical, one might almost say realistic, method for attaining a realization of God. It requires no trauma, is far removed from catatonic trance and avoids special vocabularies and recondite ritual; it is a very special brand of mysticism and the principal theological gift of Spain to the world at large. No better exemplars could be found than this curiously assorted pair of Avila; they were hard-headed realists when it came to the management of religious societies and self-disciplined intellects when it came to rationalizing and reporting their religious experiences. They insisted, however, upon the reality of their approach to God and defended it in pure and simple prose, none better than these sentences from the opening of Teresa’s Interior Castle:
A feature of university life in Spain is the tuna, a group of students dressed as medieval troubadours who roam the streets playing guitars and tambourines, in which they collect contributions.
Few tasks which I have been ordered to undertake have been so difficult as this present one of writing about prayer because I do not feel that the Lord has given me the spirituality for it, and because for the last three months I have been suffering from such noises in the head that I find it difficult to write even about ordinary things.… But I began to think of the soul as a castle made of diamond or very clear crystal in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.… For if we consider the matter, the soul of the righteous is but a paradise in which, as God tells us, He takes delight.… Let us then consider the many mansions of this castle, some up high, others lower down, still others along the sides, and in the very center of all the principal one, where takes place the most secret intercourse between God and the soul.
They are children bathed in sunlight, Teresa and Juan, and they illuminated Avila and all Spain.
It is obvious that to an organized Church the mysticism expressed in the above quotation from Teresa poses a threat, for it runs the risk of degenerating into the Quaker heresy of ‘each man his own priest,’ because if by the mystical process one can attain direct contact with God, the intercession of Church and prelate is no longer essential, although it may for social reasons continue to be convenient. It was this potentiality in the preaching of Teresa and Juan that kept them hovering between sainthood and heresy, and much of the opposition they encountered during their working lives originated in an honest fear on the part of the Church that they were encouraging in others, if not practicing themselves, a separatism which must end in apostasy.
After their deaths that is what happened. The Illuminati, those who found God for themselves through the mystical illumination of their own souls, became quite a plague to the Church in Spain; they were considered no better than Protestants and had to be eliminated. The Inquisition was especially harsh in dealing with them, and those who were not burned were exiled, so that one sees in Avila not only the glory of Teresa and Juan but also the degeneration of their ideas in the practices of the Illuminati.
I had not come to Avila, which I remember as a uniformly evocative town, to recall Santa Teresa; I came to pay homage to one of the finest artists Spain has produced, the equal in his field to Cervantes in the novel or Valázquez in painting. I had found him for myself in one of the tardiest discoveries on record. When I was a student the music of Palestrina struck me with force; it was exactly what I had been looking for and I have never since tired of listening to The Mass of Pope Marcellus, which must be one of the finest pieces of choral music. But once in Germany when I bought a Polydor record of some Palestrina music, I found that the second side had been filled out with a short composition by another Italian composer, Tommaso Lodovico da Vittoria, of whom I had not heard. It was an ‘Ave Maria’ of such exquisite construction that I found myself playing it eight times for every once that I played Palestrina. Of all the musical settings for this prayer, and I am not forgetting Bach and Schubert, I found Vittoria’s the finest, and when I looked about for other compositions by this minor Italian, I found other pieces which seemed to me about as good as choral music could be, and I began to wonder why Palestrina was so well known and his countryman so little.
I am ashamed to say that ten or fifteen years passed before I discovered that my Tommaso Lodovico da Vittoria was not an Italian at all but a Spaniard from Avila named Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611), who customarily added Abulensis (of Avila) to his name, and that he had written a dozen great works which stand with the best of his age, or of any age for that matter. In time I acquired recordings of his Officium Defunctorum (Mass for the Dead, 1603), which critics usually select as his masterpiece, his motets and especially his Responsories for Tenebrae (1585), those deeply moving evening prayers. The Officium Defunctorum has additional interest for anyone who has visited Avila; Victoria wrote it for the funeral of the Empress María, daughter of Carlos V and sister of Felipe II, and its first performance occurred in the convent where Victoria served as chaplain, that of the Descalzas Reales, first of the Teresan convents in Madrid.
As Victoria becomes better known, the grandeur of his production is increasingly recognized. He was the equal of Palestrina in all except homophony, and this he seems to have avoided consciously. The richness of his construction and the dramatic manner in which he interweaves as many as six threads of sound, uniting them occasionally in majestic chords, form one of the joys of sixteenth-century music and I would suppose that for many who know music generally, the discovery of Victoria will be one of the few remaining delights. There could be no better approach than a recording of his majestic Christmas responsory ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ (O Great Mystery, 1572), which is divided into three contrasting parts: the animals observe Christ lying in their manger; people voice their astonishment at a virgin birth; and all explode into one of the finest hallelujahs ever written. Because of its variety and power, the ‘Mysterium’ is a favorite of professional singers and numerous good recordings exist.
As I walked through the narrow streets of Avila, listening to the voices of Victoria’s choirs as they sang the music I had come to know so well, I reflected on the curious fate that had overtaken Spanish music. Victoria died in 1611, on August 27, a day held in reverence by mystics throughout the world as the anniversary of Santa Teresa’s vision of being struck in the heart by a lance of fire held by an angel. He left Spanish music the equal of any being composed in Europe; each basic building block required for future construction had been fashioned and there was no structural reason why Spanish music should not have matured as did Italian and German and every reason why it should have surpassed French and English, but in the decades that followed, it retreated slowly, step by step, from its capable beginnings until it foundered in trivia. Even its failures lacked reach; the inheritors of Victoria produced no great masses, no soaring affirmations of belief, no operas, no symphonies, no string quartets, so that one can only ask, ‘What happened?’
I spent three nights in Avila wrestling with this problem, for although the focus of my question was music, it applied equally to drama, painting, poetry and to a lesser extent the novel, and if I could find a reasonable answer to the problem of music, I might discover what had happened to the other arts. After such favorable starts, why had there come decline?
I liked Spanish music. I had studied most of the work done by Falla, Albéniz, Granados (1867–1916) and Turina (1882–1949) and had an understanding of at least the first and last of that Big Four. I judged Fal
la’s work to be as inspired thematically as any then produced in Europe; El sombrero de tres picos and El amor brujo are gold mines of invention and are equaled only by the best work of Richard Strauss. As for Turina, his Sinfonía sevillana, which one can hear only on records and then with difficulty, seems a fine lament for lost opportunities; it cannot be called a great symphony in the class of the best writing done by French and English composers, let alone the German, but it is a rich tapesty and one that I have always liked.
But the more I listened to Spanish music the more I began to suspect that it failed because it lacked inherent seriousness; it did not direct itself to the major themes of life and thereby condemned itself to a secondary accomplishment. It could produce zarzuelas but not operas or symphonies. The fault could not lie with the composers, for they give ample evidence of their competence; it must have lain with the society in which they worked. Something quite stifling happened to Spanish intellectual life following the death of Victoria and it is reflected in the decline of Spanish music, as it would have to be. The melodies remain, the rhythms, the technical competence and the brilliant orchestration, but the heart has gone dry.
I once asked an international conductor about this, and he said, ‘I love to conduct Falla. So colorful, so inventive. But whenever I touch his music he reminds me that what Spain needed in his day was not Spanish themes but the full explosion of world ideas. Falla of course understood this, for he had worked in Paris, but his audiences did not, and they would not have supported a composer of international stature. When you cut a nation off from world intercourse dreadful things happen.’ He had recently conducted in four Spanish cities and was disturbed to find that even in 1966 Spain did not import or know the work that was being done by contemporary composers. ‘It’s a closed society. Falla and Albéniz, Mozart and Beethoven.’