Description

España de la Guerra “The Spanish political and military songs of the war in Spain 1808 to 1814”

• by Brian Jeffery

• Soft Cover

• 417 Pages

• English Text

This new book is about the Spanish political and military songs of the war in Spain from 1808 to 1814, that is to say the war known in the UK as the Peninsular War and in Spain as the Guerra de la Independencia. These songs have until now scarcely been studied, listed or even mentioned, no doubt because most of their surviving musical scores are outside Spain, in libraries in London, Lisbon, Den Haag and elsewhere. This is the first time as far as we know that anyone has made a detailed list of the extant copies of these songs, both the literary (text-only) sources and the surviving music scores, combining and gathering information from them, from external sources, and from the political and military background. The book has 417 pages, and the catalogue of songs with their sources includes about 160 songs.

The principal composer of songs of the war was Fernando Sor, who has six known songs of this kind to his credit, all of them discussed in this book. The book gives full and often previously unexplored details about the circumstances in which he and others wrote and composed these songs.