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We are still not fully aware of the rich musical heritage of Catalonia. Not only serious cultivated or art music, but popular styles of music such as the spoken-sung sarsuela genre, musical theatre, cabaret, revues or variety shows all form part of a wide-ranging musical history. The three examples of the popular cuplé style (a risqué theatrical song, common in the early 20th century) published here are an excellent example not just of this musical heritage, whose creation and performance was successful in a certain period of time, but also of a kind of music which went on to form part of the repertoire of artists and singers who would come along later such as Mary Santpere, Guillermina Motta, Núria Feliu, Salomé, Sílvia Marsó or the La Trinca group. The lack of awareness of this heritage is something we must put right as soon as possible.
The period when the cuplé music style took off was a complex time for Barcelona, demographically speaking, as the population almost doubled in size between 1910 and 1930. Many people migrated to the capital city from other areas in Catalonia and also from places such as Murcia, Aragon and Valencia. These social changes led to the creation of certain archetypes used in the world of popular culture, like the young servants or female shop assistants missing their home town, as they tried to deal with life in an industrialized city.(...)
(...) With these cuplés, exquisitely and wonderfully arranged by the composer Jordi Domènech, we enjoy not just the history of the Paral·lel Theatre in Barcelona but also a sociological testimony of a moment in our recent history. It was a fascinating time which also saw the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, a moment of magic reflected in Tuthom Jahma by Joan Costa and Manuel Sugrañes, a cuplé whose message is still valid today:
A Egipte com veíeu (In Egypt, as you can see,)
tot són mòmies, ai déu meu, (Mummies are found all over,)
i en aquí si us hi fixeu (And if you look around here too,)
es veuen mòmios per tot arreu.(You’ll also see mummies* everywhere.)
[Translator’s note: ‘mummy’ is also a colloquial word for a fool in Catalan]
Oriol Perez i Treviño