The Iglesias family is a case worth studying in San Sebastián. All four brothers became artists. Two writers, Eduardo and Lourdes; a leading sculptor, Cristina, and a musician, Alberto, with an international career at the age of 67. At first they tried to dissuade him, but he persisted and eventually had a career, especially in the cinema, that marked a before and after for the Spaniards on the international stage. Iglesias has won eleven Goya Awards and has been nominated for the Hollywood Oscars four times. He has composed 14 soundtracks for Pedro Almodóvar, with his scores heard around the world. But none of this made him break his almost monastic devotion to music. In addition to cinema, Iglesias composes his own work, characterized by a rich delicacy, a powerful solidity and the desire for direct contagion without losing complexity. While preparing his first opera, he also composed a cantata entitled Phantom Songs, which was released on the Quartet label. To achieve this, he cultivated luxurious collaborations, for example with the countertenor Carlos Mena and the pianist Juan Pérez Floristán. Both accompanied him in this piece, which sets poems by John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, Pier Paolo Pasolini, René Char and Samuel Beckett to music. A sonic journey, transcendent and rich in nuances, where the power of the word is strengthened by the notes of this boy who admired the pianist Alfred Brendel when, as a teenager, he heard him play with his fingers covered in tape at the San Sebastian musical Fortnight. While dusting off an old piano at home, Iglesias didn’t give up on his dream of becoming a composer. Today he is a reference teacher.
Of four brothers belonging to the Iglesias family, four artists: How did this glorious catastrophe come about?
There were five of us. But our younger brother died at the age of 28. How did it happen? Well, I do not know…
His parents certainly had something to do with it.
My father was not an artist but a businessman, but he had a curious mind, very free and intellectually restless. I think they were surprised by this outburst. At first they tried to calm me down with music. But then they understood and encouraged me.
How did they try to appease him?
At 17, they told me not to pursue music exclusively and to pursue a more formal career with more opportunities. They saw it as a very difficult thing, and it is. I went to Bilbao to start medicine, but after a year and a half I decided against it. Then they gave me some good advice: study philosophy. And they were right.
Because it really is a race with many starts, even though most people don’t believe it?
Oh well. Now knowledge has a high value. With the foundation it provides you, you can anticipate what is coming. I didn’t finish reading it, but it had a big impact on me. First, the need and habit of reading. It made me love books that are difficult for me to understand and appreciate the difficulty of reading.
We should not be afraid of not understanding it, but rather the will and even extra motivation to achieve it.
This brings us into the territory in which music exists. Should we understand it? The clue that leads us to this need to understand it is a fact, it moves us forward. But staying in a place with a different language where transmission is difficult also creates a pleasant feeling. Living without understanding many things is part of our mind.
It’s what they call secret.
Yes, exactly.
And if we apply this to poetry, as you did, and combine the two, do we then multiply this effect?
Poetry and philosophy tend towards the inaccessible but luminous. Poets master the language and look beyond it. For Phantom Songs I let myself be carried away by those poets who are dark, complex, more impenetrable or difficult at first glance and can be understood in different ways. Music fits perfectly into this variety of meanings. Pasolini, Beckett, René Char, John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens… They are poets of feelings, sensitivity and, moreover, they seek the journey of the spirit. Just as novels can be translated into films, poems can be translated into music.
Alberto Iglesias, in the studio he set up in his home in Madrid.Ángela Suárez
How do you manage to bring out this other meaning in the music?
There is an evocation of meaning in music that I usually deal with. In this work the music attempts to evoke the meaning of the poems. Not literally, of course. In the cinema we try to use music to suggest what we see. There are gradations and paths. And this is where each composer’s style comes into play.
There is also music composed before impressionism. In the Baroque, for example The four Seasonsby Vivaldi, or in Romanticism with that Pastoral, Sixth Symphony by Beethoven.
Also. Or with the word in Monteverdi, which tries to complement the spoken language with song, so that it explodes and shines in the head.
If we put ourselves in the mentality of a baroque man, we can understand how music is used to help the audience see images. This begins to break with Wagner, it returns in Impressionism or with Mahler.
It’s different for every author. In this day and age, from the beginning of the 20th century, complexity can eat away at any non-musical meaning.
Are the codes from the beginning of the 20th century broken with the avant-garde and leading us to the cliff?
Yes, when complex languages are proposed, it seems that there is no room for the utopia that tries to see through music, for example… I approach this attempt with Phantom Songs.
One way in which this break is redirected in the 20th century is also through cinema.
Sure, that’s how I see it. Many musicologists have denigrated this return of music to the connection of meaning. But cinema has evolved it enormously and achieved something unpredictable. What impresses me most about it, what challenges me the most, is the close-up. When the music was in the foreground, it accompanied him and made the thought speak. Together with the landscapes and their synthesis, the proximity to people’s minds, faces and words gives the music the dimension of a new language.
Does that scare you?
The danger lies in patterns repeating themselves.
This also brings us to Leitmotifs Wagnerian, which cinema takes up in an astonishingly practical way to define character.
Yes, but with the risk of taking a catalog of oft-repeated musical moments and turning them into something banal. But it is something that is also in our lives and surrounds us. The use of music in bars, for example, has trivialized it and lost its category, its unusual element.
What he says about the close-up is of course in contrast to the perception of the characters in the opera, where the audience views them from a distance. Will the cinematic close-up become a musical weapon that is as suggestive as it is dangerous?
I find it fascinating, but it scares me very much. You have to get them to speak without words. It is intended to give your silence thoughts, feelings, a projection into the future and also a memory.
And in this trance does it guide the viewer or does it try to confuse them?
You have to be very careful about pointing out the obvious. Music is a deadly weapon, as I have already said, to avoid the danger of becoming banal. Every time it has to be different. Find a balance. Sometimes you make progress; Others don’t say more than what you say. Music can offer a lot of subtlety. Because of the melodic evidence or repetition that the viewer recognizes immediately, even if they cannot sing. This defines the characters and you have to be careful with it.
Wagner aside, credit for the repetition and use of too much Leitmotifs in contemporary cinema someone like John Williams?
Well, he does it very well, with brilliant delicacy and power.
John Williams will have been a before and after for the generation after him, his own. But you are also heir to a legacy of other names in Spain and Europe, among which avant-garde personalities stand out Luis de Pablo To Bernaola. How does it affect you?
You inspired me a lot. Luis de Pablo is fundamental for me. What he did in the cinema seems fundamental to me because of its simplicity, like “The Hunt” by Carlos Saura or “The Spirit of the Hive” by Víctor Erice. I also feel connected to French and Italian music: to Nino Rota, to Morricone. They influenced me a lot. But I had more of a tendency towards abstraction, which I shared with the melodic.
Between the European and the Hollywood, do Morricone and Williams represent the two points of attraction that were Verdi and Wagner in 19th century opera?
Yes, this comparison seems accurate to me. I am more Verdi, although Wagner influenced us. Nevertheless, Williams recorded European and Russian music, the traces of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But also those of the Jewish composers who, like Korngold, emigrated to Hollywood and exported their Central European talent to an emerging industry.
Alberto Iglesias, portrayed in his home in Madrid. Angela Suárez
That is, in this respect everything comes from Europe.
Well, yes, but in the United States they have modified it, discovered sublanguages and additions that make it unique. In any case, the working methods are also different. There they are more industrial and now very technological in the repetition of patterns. There are even cooking shows with epic music like this… Sort of like terrible musical fast food.
Although what I say leaves a certain impression on you, it seems to me: what you have managed to do as a composer of soundtracks in Spain is to cross the border and become a sought-after international author. Is he conscious?
For many composers of this generation before mine, cinema was something nourishing. For me it represents a fundamental language that raises musical questions that are not so simple. In the previous generation they had a black hole.
Which?
The sound. They couldn’t adopt her, they considered it a step backwards. Synonym of old. If you practiced tonality, if you went into the black hole, you were trash, the worst. However, to me it seems extraordinary. And also the limits of tonality. These movements were important because they produced free spirits. And now his music, which was also rejected, is being played much better.
They watched you and you were chosen for it.
I don’t know if that’s that much. A canon emerged that occupied the institutions. Tonality didn’t mean progress. But we have now returned to a channel that encompasses a diverse and varied river. Many trends can coexist. Now I have allowed myself to return to tonality, to believe in melody and even to keep a foot – or both – in popular music, in folklore, in flamenco, in African music, as something so true and comparable to the complexity , to which others allude. This allows me to find myself in a delicious place that takes me to the opera.
Are you telling me you’re hanging out with one?
Yes, the first one I’m tackling, but I don’t know if I should call it an opera.
Let’s call it that before anyone thinks of something else.
OK. And I want to do it in Spanish. It is a journey of initiation, a choreographer traveling through unexplored terrain, through a place of fantasy in 1998. It has classical echoes, I also include ballets, as in baroque opera. Over there… Ellipse… I want to do it with my sister Cristina, I feel a very close connection to her world and imagination.
Do you feel very close to your siblings?
Yes, a lot of them, all three. I share their life, their creation, their writing, their art. For me it is very important.
The family, the roots?
Yes, I’m very happy to take care of it. When we share things, the space becomes a place of high intensity.
And security too?
Besides, like nature, I need it.
Basque to the core…
If the truth. I also have small children, 11 and 6, except the eldest who is 35 years old. Therefore, I can’t help but be optimistic about the future. I can’t transfer the apocalypse to you. May the apocalypse not distort curiosity and the desire for knowledge.
That is, if someone comes to you with a proposal to compose a soundtrack for a dystopia, do you say “no”?
Not the scary ones. Spreading fear seems easy to me. I’m not interested. However, I also believe that it is good and healthy to repeat it, that something original can emerge from it.
To what extent do you follow a director’s instructions? Do you talk to them a lot? Do you allow yourself to be controlled?
I talk to them a lot, yes, but obedience is not expected from me because that would be the easy thing. Almodóvar, who I have worked with the most, 14 films already, always talks to me a lot and I, as a sponge, let myself go. I’m usually one of the first to see the finished film, but he always tells me: surprise me. I like finding random things where the Virgin appears in some way. Get carried away. A composer in the cinema is a machine of disordered ideas. I try to make sure the unconscious impulse is there. I like automatic writing and then building. I succeeded very well. With Almodóvar or Julio Medem, who trusted my unconscious a lot. Also with Iciar Bollain or Tomas Alfredson, those who trust what he will do.
Also about his sobriety?
I’m sober but with steps. I like to be silly sometimes.
I can’t help but notice that your piano is beautiful. I can imagine it will have a lot of meaning for you.
It’s special, yes, it’s from 1922, a Steinway with a very nice touch, very bright, similar to the one played by Glenn Gould. My parents bought it from a friend who had almost given up on it. At the same time he had bought it from some ladies in San Sebastián. I restored it and brought it to Madrid.
I mean, does it have anything to do with your absolute musical awakening?
Yes, it reminds me of my mother. She really liked me becoming a musician.
Even if I tried to dissuade him?
In this sense, more like my father. She doesn’t. The most important thing for a mother is that her child enjoys what she does.
Have you been able to enjoy your success and your four Oscar nominations?
Yes, these things made my mother very proud, she cut out the newspapers and talked about them at the market. She really liked sports and prizes seemed to be very important to her.
Which sport did you like?
Football, Real Sociedad. Apparently. She was a superfan, my dad was nothing. Her two brothers had played and she gave them an analysis like Valdano. All of this gave him great joy. For my father, it was the greatest joy to see us all together.
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