Spanish Songs, Op. 100

During the Civil War, the Republican government organised the evacuation of children to several countries, including the Soviet Union. They were expected to return once the war ended, but Franco’s victory, followed by the Second World War and the Cold War, meant that many, remembered collectively as “Niños de Rusia” (children of Russia), remained in the Soviet Union for decades. 

Although they became integrated into Soviet society, they also maintained a strong sense of Spanish identity. Spanish continued to be spoken within the community, while anniversaries of the Republic, theatrical performances, literary evenings, and musical events helped preserve memories of the country they had left behind.

Music occupied a central place in this process of cultural preservation. Songs remembered from Spain accompanied school celebrations, family gatherings, amateur choirs, and commemorative ceremonies organised by the Republican colony, and were passed from one generation to the next largely through oral tradition. Songs that had once been part of everyday life in Spain acquired new meanings in the Soviet Union, where they became expressions of identity, and remembrance for a generation shaped by displacement.

One of the children who carried and preserved this musical heritage into exile was Iván Cobo. During the 1950s, his wife, Liudmila Cobo, shared several of these melodies with the celebrated mezzo- soprano Zara Dolukhanova, who recognised both their musical beauty and their historical significance. Dolukhanova subsequently introduced the songs to Dmitri Shostakovich, who arranged six of them for voice and piano, publishing them as Spanish Songs, Op. 100.

This was not the composer’s first engagement with the Spanish Civil War. In November 1936, he had composed the incidental music for “Salute to Spain!”, a play that presented the defence of the Spanish Republic as part of an international struggle against fascism. Written twenty years later during the Khrushchev Thaw, Spanish Songs belong to a very different historical moment. There are no battles, speeches, or political slogans. Instead, the Civil War is present through the lives of the people who carried these songs into exile.

The song cycle therefore owed its existence not to the collection of folk music in Spain itself, but to the survival of Spanish musical traditions within the Republican exile community in the Soviet Union. It consists of six arrangements of traditional melodies: “Granadina” (Adiós, Granada), “Mozuca”, “En Samir de los Caños”, “Ronda”, “Eres alta y delgada”, and “Soñé”. Several came from the northern regions from which many of the evacuated children had departed, while others had long circulated through popular song and zarzuela before the Civil War.

Shostakovich approached these melodies with unusual restraint. Rather than rewriting or orchestrating them into colourful national miniatures, he preserved their melodic outlines almost unchanged, concentrating his creative contribution on subtle harmonic settings and piano accompaniments that enhanced, rather than overshadowed, the character of the original songs.

Mikhail Lukonin’s interpretation is one of the finest performances of the cycle. It allows listeners to hear the melodies that travelled from Republican Spain to the Soviet Union, where Shostakovich transformed them into Spanish Songs, Op. 100, bringing together Spanish folk traditions and his own distinctive musical language.

SGF