A recent flamenco performance was publicized with the advice that the performance presented “authentic working class Gypsy flamenco” Whoaa! ... there are social classes in the art? Some kinds of flamenco for working class people, and some for the bourgeoisie? Let's look at that, because, like Diego said, there's something there.

As is well known, flamenco comes from the underclass; from the predominantly gitano agricultural workers, metal workers and miners of Andalucia. That’s true of all flamenco. And, its history affects the way it is supported by the public and its ability to attract sources of money which are necessary for most arts to successfully continue. And that affects the content. We can look at the differences between flamenco and its sister art, opera, which also has a long history.

Artistically flamenco has some things in common with opera, but they have some major differences. The stories which are told by the cantaor in flamenco are stories about love and loss of people of the underclass (and are almost impossible to follow for those of us who are less than fluent in Andaluz Spanish.) In opera, the librettos are often stories about powerful people (and, sometimes, their interaction with lower class people), and in fact the dictionaries tell us that opera was created by powerful people in renaissance Tuscany who were consciously trying to recreate the Greek dramas of gods and kings. Those origins among the wealthy have consequences; opera is still financially supported quite lavishly by the wealthy and powerful, and flamenco, which started as a more or less private celebration by an underclass, by and large, is not.

When in 1874 George Bizet created the opera Carmen, which is about a proud and independent gypsy woman struggling to make a life in nineteenth century Sevilla, the audiences in Paris, where it was created and first opened, were scandalized. This was not the drama about lives of the nobility that was customary; here was a story of a realistic struggle about the sexuality and independence of a common gypsy girl. The lead singer, mezzo-soprano Galli-Marié, saw her career ended, as she became unemployable. The producers were reduced to selling tickets at a steep discount. Bizet died during the opening run.

To digress for a moment, Bizet based his opera on the novella of Prosper Mérimée which was first published in 1845. The novella is a quite convincing story about Carmen and her friends and lovers in the underworld of Andalucia. Mérimée himself was a fascinating man, an archeologist, multilingual, and one whose writing identifies him as a political radical, keenly sensitive to the changing currents of his time. In 1830 he was befriended by the Countess de Montijo, and became the tutor of her younger daughter Eugenia, (Doña Maria Eugenia Ignacia Augustina Palafox de Guzmán Portocarrero y Kirkpatrick) who had been born during the famous Granada earthquake of May 5 1826. It is said that he claimed that the Countess was the source for the Carmen story.

Apparently he coached the daughter on how to behave during her courtship by Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1853, Louis Napoleon came to power through a coup d’etat and was crowned Emperor Napoleon III of France. At his side was Eugenia, now Empress Eugénie of France. Mérimée was made a senator. The Empress Eugénie was forced to flee Paris in 1871, to escape the proletarian revolution called The Commune, and took refuge in England. In 1917 my father, an officer in the British Army, having been seriously wounded in the Third Battle of Ypres, became a patient in her house in Farnborough, southwest of London, which had been turned into a military hospital. After the hospital was closed at the end of the war, my father, having ingratiated himself with some of her staff, stayed on for a while as a guest of the Empress. It’s a small world.

But, back to flamenco and class. Flamenco, as is well known, originated in the landless agricultural workers of Andalucía, many of them gitanos. Indeed, in the eighteenth century gitanos were prohibited from taking up any other kind of employment, a law that was not always enforced by the local authorities, who valued their gitano metal workers and horse dealers. In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, a majority of gitanos were living in the cities of Andalucía, rather than the small agricultural towns. Flamenco nevertheless originated in a time and place when there were more or less only two social classes: landowners and peasants, that is to say before there was an industrial working class in the modern sense. As these same people moved off the land and into the cities, and took up work as artisans and factory workers, they carried with them what became flamenco. The traditional letra of a sevillanas copla tells us:

Mi novio es cartujano
Miarma, pintor de loza
Pintor de loza
Mi novio es cartujano
Ay ay ay

My lover is from Cartuja
My soulmate is a painter of crockery,
A painter of crockery,
My lover is from Cartuja,
Ay, ay, ay.

(Cartujano; from the barrio of Cartuja, adjacent to Triana, so called after the Carthusian Monastery that was there until the Napoleonic occupation of 1808-1814. The district has since before Roman times been the center of the pottery trade in Sevilla, using the local clay. In Rome it is said there is a hill composed of the remains of the amphorae used to take Andaluz olive oil to Rome.)

Until the mid to late nineteenth century, flamenco (which wasn’t yet called flamenco) remained a somewhat private celebration, and it was little known outside southern Spain. Indeed, to go back to George Bizet and Carmen for a moment. it is puzzling how he was able, as the operatic historians tell us, to include elements of flamenco music in his work. He never visited Spain, saying it would distract him, it is not likely that there was flamenco in Paris, there were no means of audio recording at that time, and flamenco music was then, as now, seldom written down. It seems probable that he incorporated musical elements from Spanish composers (Yradier, Manuel Garcia) who had themselves been influenced by hearing flamenco and had transcribed it.

The early form of flamenco was more suited to an audience of friends and neighbors in the local bar, and this is the form that survives in peña performances today. But a performer cannot live on that, and when, in the twentieth century, flamenco increasingly became a profession, it became necessary to move into the theatres and sell tickets. In the theatres, the tendency was to give more emphasis to the dancer, rather than the singer. Dancers began to compare themselves to the stars of ballet, and to create a more refined and abstract style. Indeed one of the principal companies of flamenco has been, and is, the Ballet Nacional de España, and many of the contemporary primero bailaores in Spain have studied classical Spanish dance and ballet as well as flamenco. One of the most elegant and graceful flamenco dancers in the last thirty years was the late Antonio Gades. Born in Elda, Valencia in 1936, he left school at the age of eleven and was more or less a street kid until he was noticed by dancer Pilar Lopez, joining her company in 1952, and becoming director of the Ballet Nacional in 1978. He died of cancer in 2004.

So, flamenco now exists in a somewhat split world. On the one hand some performers present a form which tries to carry the spirit of the peña and the cortijo onto the contemporary theatrical stage, where there is some hope of making money. The danger there is that this develops into a theatrical entertainment analogous to vaudeville, with a conscious attempt to engage the audience with humor and little tricks. Some dancers have recently thought it amusing to turn away from the audience and wiggle their backside, which sometimes elicits an audience response, but one has to say that that’s not flamenco. Not even working class flamenco.

On the other hand there is the strain which takes the traditional forms of flamenco puro, and tries to perfect them, by improving and elevating the technique without doing injury to the traditional content. Here the danger is that this becomes overly intellectual and thereby loses the earthy roots of the art.

So, flamenco goes on, changing as it goes. We can hope that it will continue to preserve the content which tells us of its beginnings, while doing so in a voice which speaks to contemporary audiences.

Sources:
Wikipedia: Carmen, George Bizet, Empress Eugénie
Kathleen Harris, Lunch with Eugénie, unpublished essay, 1977.
Jasper Ridley, Napoleon III and Eugenie, Viking Press, 1980
Prosper Mérimée, Carmen, London, 1881

John L Harris, October 2007