Fiesta -lírica- en casa de Rolón

Abstract

This article deals with the vocal output of José Rolón (1876-1945), one of the most important of Mexican musicians. His songs —written during the first three decades of the twentieth century— enable us to retrace the different facets of this composer's musical style. His first works, modeled after the French mélodie, are witness to his consummate assimilation of the harmonic language of composers such as Fauré or Debussy which underpin the different poetical images. In his settings of Mexican lyrics, Rolón distinguished himself in several ways. His keen poetical taste —evident in the selection of verses by the Contemporáneos— was accompanied by a reasoned and fully worked-out musical approach well-suited to distinguishing the essential aesthetic characteristics of poets such as Gorostiza, Pellicer, Villaurrutia or Novo. Rolón reveals himself as one of the Mexican composers who best understood the poetics of these writers, one who succeeded in giving to each poet's verse a musical language with its own personal features, along with a musico-poetical inventiveness that finds expression in an extraordinary repertoire of songs.