Johann Sebastian Bach spent almost his entire life in a small region of central Germany whose boundaries are marked by the town of his birth, Eisenach in Thuringia, and the place of his death, the Saxon city of Leipzig, which lies only one hundred miles to the east. Unlike his famous contemporary Handel, who was also born in the region, Bach did not venture beyond this relatively confined area save for two years spent as a chorister in the north German city of Lüneburg, and occasional trips to the important musical centres of Lübeck, Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. But Bach's music stands in counterpoint to the provinciality of his biography; his organ works encompass an unprecedented range of diverse traditions, demonstrating a mastery of the organ art that flourished in his native Thuringia, a fluency in the flamboyant language of north German organ playing of the preceding generation, and a profound knowledge of French and Italian idioms, the dominant national styles of the eighteenth century. Bach transformed and synthesised techniques and styles ranging from the stile antico of renaissance polyphony to the most up-to-date thrills of Italian orchestral writing.

According to C. P. E. Bach his father had been exposed to a wide range of music from an early age: he had studied the music of ‘some old and good Frenchmen’, Italian and south German composers of the seventeenth century including Girolamo Frescobaldi, Johann Pachelbel, Johann Jakob Froberger, Johann Caspar Kerll, Nicolaus Adam Strungk, and the most important north German organists of the period – Dieterich Buxtehude, Johann Adam Reincken, Nicolaus Bruhns, and Georg Böhm (David and Mendel 1966: 278).

In 1812, A. F. C. Kollmann, the German-born theorist and organist at the Royal German Chapel, St James's Palace, summarised the state of organ music in Britain as follows:

Kollmann's expression of confidence in Bachian textures as models for the future development of a British organ repertoire is not surprising given his profound interest in his countryman's music. He found it remarkable, however, that despite London's importance as ‘the most opulent city on the face of the globe’, there was not a single instrument equal to the organs of Germany and the Netherlands, and that even some of the most populous and richest churches in England lacked an organ. He further lamented the general inadequacy of an organist's remuneration and concluded that organ playing as a ‘particular study’ was not encouraged as on the continent (Kollmann 1812: 21).

Kollmann's thirty-year residency in London notwithstanding, the typical British organ must have remained ineffectual in his opinion when compared with the continental giants at Haarlem, Weingarten and Hamburg (Michaeliskirche), and the laissez-faire attitudes to the art of organ playing perplexing. The extant 1764 John Byfield organ at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe (restored by Noel Mander in 1959; see Figure 5.9, p. 69) provides an excellent opportunity to see what Kollmann knew as a large indigenous organ around the time of his arrival, an instrument fully commensurate with the full and solo-stop voluntaries of Stanley, Boyce, Walond and their imitators then in circulation.

The Neo-Russian style

To assert that a particular historical moment marks the beginning of a particular cultural movement is a hazardous proposition inasmuch as any such moment is only one link in a chain of preceding and subsequent conditions that characterize or define such a movement. However, while precedents to, and consequences of, a “magic moment” (e.g. 1917) can always be found, there is often a constellation of events and circumstances that hastens or emphasizes what may have been a latent action, giving rise to its manifestation as a cultural expression (e.g. constructivism after the October Revolution) and there is at least a conventional wisdom in pursuing this method. The decade of the 1850s is such a moment, for it marked an important juncture in the evolution of Russian culture and gives us a strategic date for establishing a division between what could be called the “classical” and “modern” eras of the Russian visual arts.

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the Russian school of painting and sculpture, as opposed to the Moscow and regional schools of icon painting, had been centered in St. Petersburg, where the Imperial Academy of Arts held sway, supporting the neoclassical, idealist canon. Distant from the wellsprings of native culture, the St. Petersburg Academy had elaborated its artistic ideal according to the techniques and aesthetic canons of classical antiquity and cultivated the models set by the Old Masters. But with the passing of Karl Briullov and Aleksandr Ivanov, its greatest sons, in the 1850s, the autocracy of the Academy quickly waned and its official style became increasingly conservative.

The Revolution of 1868 marked the beginning of a cultural process that by 1936 left Spain torn into warring camps. The period that began with revolution and ended in Civil War was punctuated by the short-lived First Republic (1874-1875), the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy (1875), a disastrous war with the United States (1898), a coup d'etat by General Primo de Rivera (1923) and the proclamation of the Second Republic (1931). No wonder that in 1897 the novelist and playwright Perez Galdós wrote of living in a time of “confusión evolutiva” (evolving confusion) and underscored the “rapidez con que se transforman ahora nuestros gustos” (the rapidity with which our tastes are now being transformed). What was the role of the theater in such tumultuous times? Poised at the center of social and intellectual life in urban centers and enjoying a popularity that no other art form could rival until the advent of film, the stage served as a point of mediation between tradition and modernity, high culture and mass culture, Spain and the rest of Europe.

No less than other peoples, Russians have traditionally been open to the proposition that there is a logical meaning and significance to be read into their geographical position in the world. And because they are further inclined to believe that this significance of location has direct implications for the most basic questions about their national identity and destiny, it has commonly been the object of rather intense preoccupation. In the case of Russia, “location” is to be understood first and foremost in terms of a gradient running east and west, that is to say from the Orient to the Occident. The country, it is well appreciated, had the peculiar historical-geographical fate to emerge and develop in a vast intermediary space between highly differentiated zones of global civilization, and the ensuing sense of occupying some sort of critical middle ground has been pervasive, throughout modern Russian history at least.

Introduction: problems of terminology

Russian peasants, factory workers, artisans, and small traders have by tradition lived in a world made colorful by endless shades of difference, one not easily demarcated under the typical definitions and categories of popular culture. Their first loyalties have been to kinship groups, to work collectives, to the villages or districts where they lived, rather than to their own class or social group in a broad sense. For those traditional villagers who lived all their lives close to home, the opposition svoi/chuzhoi ( “our own/strange,” but close to the English polarization “us and them”)was fundamental to organizing life. Nenash (“Not-ours”) was one of the many dialect terms for the Devil, and considerable hardship awaited the nevesta (bride, but literally “unknown woman”),displaced by patrilocal tradition to her husband’s parents' family, and treated there as a stranger, though she might herself come from a village only a few miles away, or even from a household in the same village.

The industrialization of Russia, which led to a massive population movement from villages into cities, did much to soften conservatism, but did not erode it entirely; nor did peasants who went to the cities necessarily change attitudes overnight. Loyalty to a particular village was replaced by the wider, but still extremely concrete, affiliations of krai and rodina (birthplace).

Throughout her history, Russia has assumed an ambivalent attitude toward the West, an attitude conditioned by the diverse sources of initial contact. The influence of Byzantium, realized through Russia’s conversion to Christianity toward the end of the tenth century, was of signal importance. By devising an alphabet for the spoken language, her missionaries gave the Kievan state access to an established literature and facilitated the further development of an indigenous culture based upon the tenets of Orthodoxy. Yet the Greek heritage common to the cultures of Europe assumed particular forms of expression in Russia.

Many of the documents which were available in translation contributed to a conservative definition of the relations between church and state and of the ruler’s rights and duties. Together with Christian doctrine, they were “incorporated into the political structure of the state of Kiev … [and] became a basis for Russia’s further evolution.”1 With the decline of more democratic traditions during the ensuing period of Mongol conquest, this autocratic inheritance from Byzantium gained the ascendancy, putting its stamp upon the emerging state of Muscovy.

The fragmentation of Kievan Rus’ altered the primary means of communication with the West, Novgorod assuming central importance by virtue of its location on the trade routes linking Northern Europe with the Middle East. A high rate of literacy among its landowning classes and the assembly of free citizens in the veche or town council contributed to the success of a republican form of government quite unlike Moscow’s. Its function as one of medieval Europe’s most important manufacturing towns and its close commercial ties to the Hanseatic League further strengthened its identity with the West.

Until the advent of radio in the 1920s, the principal medium of 309 social communication in Spain was the press. In the first decades of the twentieth century newspapers continued to be vehicles of opinion, owned and directed by parties, groups, and individuals wishing to impress their views on society at large. As society changed they became more commercial enterprises, dependent on readers and advertisers; their aim was to satisfy the multiple interests and enthusiasms of their increasingly literate, urban audience. In spite of the domination of companies whose ownership was spread amongst mostly anonymous shareholders, pressure groups like the Catholic church, political parties (including Basque and Catalan nationalists) and trade unions figured as major players. Nevertheless, publications promoting narrow political and social ideologies led a precarious existence and were subject to restrictions when the political tide ran against them. In Barcelona the no longer party-inspired daily La Vanguardia (founded 1881) thrived, as did the Madrid-based ABC (1905), both run by family companies. Though at heart the major dailies favored particular political options, they mixed variety of coverage with political moderation in order to appeal to a wide readership.

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was fought along the multiple lines of cleavage - of class, ideology, and region - that had been opened by the processes of economic, social, and political modernization over the previous century. Yet despite its complex origins and internal dynamics, participants, commentators, and historians, then and since, have tended to reduce the war to a set of simple oppositions: democracy vs. fascism, Christian civilization vs. godless Communism, the working class vs. the rich, the center vs. the periphery, and so on. This dichotomizing tendency was perhaps inevitable in a war in which propaganda played such an important role, but it was also a consequence of a growing habit of mind among educated Spaniards to conceptualize their society in terms of the “two Spains.” Since the early nineteenth century Spaniards had disagreed - often violently - over the desirability and direction of political and social change.

Suddenly, Spain seems to be exporting culture. While the death of Generalisimo Francisco Franco in 1975 failed to usher in the radical shift in literature and the arts predicted by many observers of Spanish culture, it did mark a real conceptual change in Spain's image of itself and of the world's image of Spain. The political and historical phenomenon known as “the Transition” carried Spain away from its old image as a backward, slightly bumbling country toward a new image as a modern, democratic, chic, and vigorous cultural center. For many years, Franco's tourism industry had sold Spain as “different,” and indeed it was, but not in the way government officials hoped it would be perceived. Spain, slow to return to the international community of nations following the devastating Civil War (1936-1939) and the repressive years of the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), was different in the sense that politically it had not kept up with the rapid move into the modern world experienced in the rest of Europe and was viewed as a pariah among modern nation-states. Spain remained closed to many international influences and proudly put forth its “difference” in images of what Kathleen Vernon in her essay in the present book calls the españolada, that is, the clichéd, tradition-ridden view of flamenco girls, hot-tempered males, sunny beaches, and sculpted landscapes. La España de pandereta (the Spain of the tambourine) - the romantic and Catholic land of Bizet's fiery Carmen and Zorrilla's amorous but repentant Don Juan - was issued forth as the fetichized image of the “real” Spain.

Since the present volume deals with modern Spanish culture, it seems crucial to reflect upon the relationships between those three words and the theoretical consequences of how we choose to define culture. I will look first at the changes in the meaning of the word culture in the modern period and then raise some of the theoretical questions that underlie recent scholarship on such topics as high and low culture, gender and culture, culture and politics, and what we mean when we talk about Spanish culture.

The first thing we must do as critics of “modern Spanish culture” is to recognize that the concept of culture which underlies our academic endeavors is itself a modern one. Raymond Williams has reminded us that prior to the late eighteenth century, the word culture did not refer to a static state, or to a standard of intellectual perfection, but to a process. Culture was a synonym for cultivation, and could refer to plants, animals, or human faculties. Williams reads the transformation of the meaning of the word culture as a defensive move responding to the vast economic and social changes unleashed by the industrial revolution - materialism, emphasis on utility, the organization of the working class, and other factors (we might add changes in the role of women). It is important to recall that one of the pre-modern meanings of culture was related to “cult” in the sense of reverence or adoration. This meaning would remain embedded in the new idea of culture, as a higher spiritual state which could be achieved through reading “the best that has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase.

Upon Antoni Gaudís birth in 1852, less than ten years had passed since the foundation in Madrid of the first national School of Architecture, an institution born of the old Academy of Fine Arts. The vigorous urban development characteristic of Spain during the Restoration gave rise to a new generation of well-prepared builders. The young Gaudí, who had studied at the Facultad de Ciencias of the University of Barcelona, was now able to complete his education at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, established only a few years prior to his graduation. This wave of architecture graduates, educated in Madrid or Barcelona, would practice their profession within the framework of the new urban plans encouraged by the legislation of 1864,1876, and 1892 which regulated the expansion of major cities. Barcelona, with its 1859 Plan Cerdá, and Madrid, with its i860 Plan Castro, set the pace for the rest of the nation in urban design. This was further emphasized in the former case by the strategic talent of Ildefonso Cerda, who put in place the cornerstone of modern urbanism with his Teoría General de la Urbanizacion (A General Theory of Urbanization). The bourgeoisie, a prosperous class which was made wealthy by mining, railroads, Basque metallurgy, and Catalan textiles, embraced urban development and real estate with a fervor that was further nourished by foreign investments and a dynamic stock market.

The so-called Restoration of 1874-1875 did not exactly restore the situation of any former regime. Only from a sociological point of view did it restore, and even strengthen, the rule of the “Moderado” power block, formed in the 1840s as an amalgam of the old nobility, new landowners enriched by the disentailment of the church's lands, urban developers, Catalan textile industrialists, politicians and military upstarts. Alfonso XII's reign was a continuation of his mother's in this sense alone. Politically, the troubles which had characterized not only the rule of Isabel II but the whole of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, reaching a climax during the 1868-1874 revolutionary period, came to an end. What ensued was what Pérez Galdós called “los años bobos” (the foolish years), years without events. These resulted not only from the strongly authoritarian, almost dictatorial, hand of Antonio Canovas del Castillo, but also from the loss of prestige of the revolutionaries and to the exhaustion of the people, which after so many political upheavals welcomed the stability of the Restoration.

In his classic 1947 study of the representation of national identity in film, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, Siegfried Kracauer underscores the value of popular cinema, commercial genres with their “persistent reiteration of... pictorial and narrative motifs” in the cultural historian's reconstruction of the “inner life of a nation.” In my study of Spanish film before 19751 have sought to attend, at least in part, to Kracauer's view. Thus where many histories of Spanish cinema have focused primarily on the development of a modern Spanish art cinema that largely coincides with the emergence of a dissident anti- Francoist culture, I have been guided by somewhat different concerns. I am more interested in examining the psychic, social, and ideological functions of film in Spanish society, particularly as regards the role of cinema in presenting images of nation and national identity.

To that end I have divided this essay into three chronological blocks, deliberately rejecting the temptation of a continuous historical narrative. This three-part structure allows for the observation of revealing continuities and discontinuities in the history of the Spanish film industry that do not always coincide with those of political history or with the boundaries between popular and art cinemas. The first section deals with the 1930s and 1940s, the period of the Republic, Civil War, and the first decade of Francoism.

The currently healthy state of Catalan language and culture seems far removed from the pessimism expressed by the poet Gabriel Ferrater in an article entitled, from a quotation by Paul Valéry “Paul Reboux”, “Madame se meurt” (“Madame is Dying”). In this article, published in Castilian in 1953 during the height of Franco's power and censorship, Ferrater pronounced Catalan culture dead. According to Ferrater, the Catalan language was also in mortal danger since it was being expressed culturally - by which he meant in the printed word - only in “high” literary texts, chiefly poetry. But spoken Catalan was in everyday use, and we can say, borrowing the words of the later writer and journalist Montserrat Roig, that Ferrater expressed in this article “a fatal divorce between the life of culture and science... and the collective or 'total' life of Catalan society.” Time proved Ferrater wrong. In 1976, two decades after his statement, and a mere two months after General Franco's death, Roig could affirm emphatically that “Madame vit encore” (“Madame is still alive”) (ibid.).

Roig's post-dictatorship optimism is in clear contrast to the pessimism of Ferrater, who committed suicide in 1972 and therefore was unable to see the changes in post-Franco Spain. In the post-Franco era, the hopeless divide that Ferrater saw between cultural (literary representation) and scientific life - which in Francoist Catalonia found expression exclusively in Spanish - and the everyday sphere (or “collective life” in Roig's words) in which Catalan was mostly used, came to seem perfectly negotiable. Montserrat Roig and many other representatives of Catalan culture in the years of political transition saw it as their collective task to bridge this divide.