Carnaval

Carnaval (Op. 43) by Leonora Milà (1942) is a game of masks. On one hand, it is pianist and composer Leonora Milà’s heartfelt tribute to Robert Schumann, one of the composers she most admires and exalts. Milà is a grand connoisseur of Schumann's catalogue as exemplified by the numerous recordings throughout her artistic .The game of masks returns to the fray, because Milà’s Carnaval is not just a tribute to Schumann, but also a reverential journey through the inner workings of her own town. Her Carnaval is based on the festival’s characters and ingredients and uses the Carnival from Vilanova i la Geltrú, the town where Leonora Milà was born and has lived her entire life, as a reference point. Vilanova i la Geltrú is one of the few Catalan towns to have turned Carnival into the focal point of its festive calendar. Vilanova’s Carnival is a throwback to the American émigré tradition. In the late 19th century, young, unemployed Vilanovians with meagre economic resources emigrated to Cuba (then a Spanish colony) to try their luck and seek their fortune. Some -few- émigrés returned  with riches and organised sumptuous fests in manor houses they themselves had built. The American émigrés imported the shawl dances from Cuba, along with the architecture typical of Havana’s luxurious abodes. This inheritance remains alive in Vilanova (a town also known as little Havana through its resemblance to the Cuban capital) and is most patent in the architecture of the buildings, the cuisine and, especially, in Carnival.

Yes, Vilanova’s Carnival, thanks to its Antillean ancestry, is a festival which shies from stereotypes. It is a classic celebration, stately, with shawls for the women and jackets for the men; a romantic festival, replete with dance and music, private balls held inside the institutions, with cuisine, irony and refinement, sugary candy battles, masks and theatre. It is within this context, having recovered the celebration following 40 years of Francoist dictatorship, that Leonora Milà penned a tremendous piano work based on her own town’s Carnival and which hearkens, in its roots, back to Robert Schumann. Again, the game of masks.

The work’s structure is based on Vilanova’s Carnival calendar. His Majesty King Carnestoltes (King of the Carnival) arrives to usher in the celebration and debauchery. In turn, number 18 introduces the agony of the King and, subsequently, his death (Ash Wednewsday). In between we find Carnival’s main events and characters (the krewe, harlequin, pierrot, concubines...) blended with personal details -the aforementioned inner journey- that elicit the composer’s childhood (The Dance of the Girls, Melancholia) or manifest themselves as a folk song (in memory of her father) or as a tribute to her favourite composers (Schumann himself, and Brahms, whose shadow looms over the work’s final pieces).

Bernat Deltell