Maybe it was fortune. Maybe destiny. The truth is that, more than 15 years ago, Ignacio Menéndez-Pidal de Navascués turned on the radio at the right moment. He was driving to Malaga and while passing through Granada he heard an interview about some music files. He doesn’t remember who, or which ones, or why. Only a spark jumped in his thoughts. His family treasures a collection of sheet music that covers two centuries of music in the Casa Navascués (Cintruénigo, Navarra). “I thought: ‘Why not move this too, you don’t know what’s there,’” he explains. It was the beginning of an adventure that has allowed us to recover unpublished works and a couple of mysteries still to be solved.
The first step was to find experts interested in examining the fund, something that took several years. Until he ran into María Álvarez-Villamil, a musicologist at the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences (ICCMU). She agreed to take a look at the bottom and, at the first book she examined, she thought: “But what is this?” Now, Álvarez-Villamil explains the importance of the discovery from one of the ICCMU offices: “We almost consider it the most important private collection from this period found to date in Spain, because it gives us enormous information about domestic musical practice and about the type of repertoire that was played among families of position at the end of the 18th century. That is why there are so many unpublished works.”
The musicologist took more than 9,000 photographs of the archive, which begins with chamber music from the late 18th century intended to be performed by members of the Navascués family in their leisure time and ends with a piano arrangement of Yesterday, by The Beatles. “The background begins in 1770 and until approximately 1830, it is all music for instrumental ensemble. From 1840 there was nothing else but piano. We also saw that the interpreters go from being the men of the family to being the women,” says Álvarez-Villamil. And among those hundreds of documents, one unattributed document suddenly appeared. It was in particellas, that is, parts of each instrument written on separate scores so that each musician had their own. But one was missing: the cello.
Who owned that work? It turned out to be by Luigi Boccherini, a very important 18th century Italian musician who spent much of his career in Spain. And two of the parts were handwritten by the composer himself. They also discovered that, until that moment, only one score of that symphony existed. It is preserved in the Glinka Museum in Moscow and all its parts are autographs of the composer. “He probably arrived there after World War II,” says the musicologist. They started editing it, but the missing part left them paralyzed. The solution now, says Álvarez-Villamil, is to contact the Russian museum and ask them for a copy to be able to compare both documents: “If it could be the entire score, it would be perfect and failing that, at least the part that we lack. “That would be enough to edit it, making it clear that that part belongs to another source.”
But they have it complicated. The political situation does not facilitate access and they also know of a researcher who requested a copy of the work to study it and his request was denied. “If you can’t consult it, you can’t do much else. But we are on that path,” the musicologist adds with hope.
What they have been able to recover are unpublished works by Luis Misón, musician of the Royal Chapel during the reign of Fernando VI. At that time, Spain was experiencing a moment of musical splendor, although until a few years ago it was thought otherwise. The best European musicians were in the country, like the castrato Farinelli, who organized the royal festivities. The court performers participated in these shows and, among them, was Misón. “We don’t know what the relationship was between Farinelli and Misón, but he did have him on staff,” explains Álvaro Torrente, professor of Music History at the Complutense University of Madrid and director of the ICCMU. Like many others, the musician fell into oblivion, but now his works are beginning to appear in collections here and there: Navarra, Seville, Mexico… “It is known that he was a composer because some of his scores are preserved, but what we have published In recent times it has duplicated the known Misón music,” says Torrente.
Misón has already been published and his work was even resurrected in a concert by the group La Fontegara México at the end of September in Cintruénigo. But there are more works to recover in the background. The next step will be to edit the also unpublished pieces that have appeared by the composer Fernando Ferandiere and that already have many classical guitarists interested. “And without advertising, eh? They find out through word of mouth,” Torrente clarifies. They have received requests from Switzerland, the United States… Pressure from musicians and publishers. Some even unpleasant. “There is a large gap in the known guitar music of this period. And when a collection appears with as many works as there are in this one, the guitarists throw themselves into the ground.” It is one of the reasons that Álvarez-Villamil explains and Torrente provides another: “When I started studying musicology, I thought that a good part of what I was researching would never arrive, that we were always pushing. Now they pull us, the performers come asking: don’t you have something for a chamber orchestra? or for a group with flute? There is more and more interest on their part to recover musical heritage and this means that there is a very big change in mentality.”
And among everything discovered, there is also a mystery. “It seems that the Duke of Alba commissioned two quartets from Joseph Haydn. It has been concluded that one of them would be Op. 42 and nothing was known about the other. Well, in the Casa Navascués we found Op. 42 in a notebook along with another quartet that said: ‘Haydn’s particular quartet’. And on top of that it is a quartet that nothing was known about until now.” Furthermore, the musicologist adds, it is something strange to be by Haydn and is made up of arrangements of popular music of the moment. “If we wanted to sell it, we would say that we have found Haydn’s lost quartet, but we are not sure,” Torrente concludes smiling. And it ends with a call. “It would be good for families who have files to look in them, because they may find surprises.”
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