Romance d'Amour: A Song History
"Romance d'Amour," known in Spanish as the "Romance anónimo," is a short solo guitar piece whose composer has never been securely identified.[1][2] In a 2002 review of the evidence, guitarist and researcher Santiago Porras Álvarez weighed the cases made for Antonio Rubira, Fernando Sor, Daniel Fortea, Miguel Llobet, David del Castillo and others, and judged none of them conclusive.[1] Music writer Elijah Wald suggests it began as a nineteenth-century study for beginners, perhaps written by Rubira.[3]
Edouard Manet, The Spanish Singer, oil on canvas, 1860. Shown for its guitarist; it has no connection to the piece.
The earliest recording known to the sources consulted here is a wax cylinder bearing the label of the Madrid firm Viuda de Aramburo, played by the guitarist Simón Ramírez and dated by the notes to its Doremi reissue to sometime between 1897 and 1901.[2][3] The container calls it a guitar study by "F. Sort," evidently meaning Fernando Sor, yet those notes observe that no such study appears among Sor's works.[2] Porras reports that Vicente Gómez brought out his own edition in 1940 and played the piece in the 1941 Hollywood film Blood and Sand.[1] Narciso Yepes's recording later served as the theme of René Clément's film Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), released in France in 1951.[3][4] The film's international success is why the piece goes by the film's name in France and much of northern Europe.[3] The film itself received an honorary Academy Award as the outstanding foreign-language film released in the United States in 1952.[4] Yepes later said he had composed the piece for his mother as a seven-year-old, a story Wald finds "quite believable were it not for the earlier recording and manuscripts."[3]
It remains one of the first pieces many classical guitar students learn.[1][2] Dana Gruber includes it in Classical Melodies For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of thirteen classical melodies for chromatic mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]
Sources
- Guitarra Artepulsado (Santiago Porras Álvarez): "Qué (no) sabemos del Romance ¿Anónimo?".
- Doremi (liner notes, scan hosted by carlosmb.com): "Andrés Segovia and His Contemporaries, Vol. 12".
- Elijah Wald, Old Friends: A Songobiography: "Romance (Jeux Interdits)".
- Britannica: "Jeux interdits".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Dana Gruber, Classical Melodies For Chromatic Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Edouard Manet, The Spanish Singer, oil on canvas, 1860. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.