Published
Sonada de adiós
Tombeau. In memoriam
The tombeau (“tomb” in French) is a composition written in memory of someone, usually a composer, whose origins lie in Baroque France. It is therefore an elegiac work that mourns a person’s death while paying tribute to them. The genre’s close connection with French musical culture helps explain its revival at the beginning of the twentieth century, when a group of French composers looked to the past for a distinctive musical identity in response to the prevailing Austro-German hegemony.
One of the most direct ways to honour an admired dead composer was to include a musical quotation from their work, as Manuel de Falla did in his Homenaje. Originally written for guitar and later adapted for piano, it formed part of the collective work Pour le tombeau de Debussy (1920). Falla introduces a theme conceived by Debussy for La soirée dans Grenade, with its unmistakable Andalusian resonances. In 1935, Falla composed another work in a similar spirit, Pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas, in memory of one of the French composers most influential upon the generation of Spaniards living in Paris. Among them was the young Joaquín Rodrigo, who also dedicated a sonata to Dukas that same year, commissioned by La Revue musicale.