Three Dances Taken From the Ballet “The Three-Cornered Hat”
I. The Neighbors II. The Miller’s Dance III. Final Dance
The score calls for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, kettledrums, side drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, xylophone, tam-tam, castanets, celesta, harp, piano, and the usual strings.
When the Russian Ballet visited Spain, Serge de Diaghilev was so much interested in the work of de Falla that he commissioned him to write a ballet on the subject of Alarcón’s novel, El Sombrero de Tres Picos.
This ballet The Three-cornered Hat was performed for the first time on any stage by the Russian Ballet at the Alhambra, London. Joaquin Turina says (The Chesterian, May, 1920) that the first version of The Three-cornered Hat was produced at the Eslava Theater, Madrid, under the title of El Corregidor y la Molinera. Turina was then conducting this theater’s orchestra. The “pantomime” of de Falla was accompanied by only seventeen players. “The composer was confronted with one great difficulty, and that was to follow musically the action of the play without spoiling the unity of his score. The music therefore continually reflected a certain anxiety on the composer’s part, as if he were trying to disentangle himself, so to speak, from the external network. The transformation of the ‘pantomime’ into a ballet at once cleared away all these difficulties. This is quite natural, for in the new version the action became reduced to a strictly indispensable minimum, and the dances became predominant, those already existing being considerably amplified.”
Turina finds the Miller’s Dance the most interesting “because of its typically Andalusian character, its fascinating rhythm which is like an affirmation of Southern art, and its Moorish character.” In the Final Dance the jota and the folk theme called vito are introduced.
The Daily Telegraph (London, July 24, 1919) said of the ballet:
“Over the whole brisk action is the spirit of frivolous comedy of a kind by no means common only to Spain of the eighteenth century. A young miller and his wife are the protagonists, and if their existence be idyllic in theory, it is extraordinarily strenuous in practice—choreographically. But that is only another way of saying that M. Massine and Mme Karsavina, who enact the couple, are hardly ever off the stage, and that both of them work with an energy and exuberance that almost leave one breathless at moments. The miller and his wife between them, however, would scarcely suffice even for a slender ballet plot. So we have as well an amorous corregidor (or governor), who orders the miller’s arrest so that the way may be cleared for a pleasant little flirtation—if nothing more serious—with the captivating wife. Behold the latter fooling him with a seductive dance, and then evading her admirer with such agility that, in his pursuit of her, he tumbles over a bridge into the mill stream. But, as this is comedy, and not melodrama, the would-be lover experiences nothing worse than a wetting, and the laugh, which is turned against him, is renewed when, having taken off some of his clothes to dry them and gone to rest on the miller’s bed, his presence is discovered by the miller himself, who, in revenge, goes off in the intruder’s garments after scratching a message on the wall to the effect that ‘Your wife is no less beautiful than mine!’ Thereafter a ‘gallimaufry of gambols’ and—curtain!”