The Three-Cornered Hat (complete ballet)

Program notes

About the Work

The Three-Cornered Hat (El sombrero de tres picos) is de Falla’s most exuberant and colourful work, a ballet bursting with the rhythms, colours and sunlight of Spain. It was one of the legendary productions of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: premiered in London in 1919, with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by none other than Pablo Picasso. De Falla expanded it from an earlier pantomime based on a popular Spanish novel, and the result is a brilliant comic tale. The story is a folk farce: a pompous, lecherous old magistrate (in his three-cornered hat of office) tries to seduce the beautiful, faithful wife of a miller, with much chasing, disguise and humiliation, until the cocky magistrate is thoroughly mocked and the miller and his wife triumph.

De Falla’s score is a feast of Spanish dance and atmosphere, scored with dazzling brilliance for a large orchestra, and punctuated by a mezzo-soprano who sings brief, flamenco-flavoured interjections. In the complete ballet (as opposed to the popular suites) we get the whole vivid sequence, including the famous final ‘Jota’ that brings the work to a riotous close. It is the perfect, sun-drenched conclusion to the concert.

What to Listen For

Listen, right at the start, for the burst of energy (a fanfare, shouts of ‘Olé!’ and castanet-clicks, with the mezzo-soprano’s flamenco-style cry) that throws us straight into the heat and colour of Andalusia. Then follow the dances, which are the heart of the work. Listen for the sultry, swaggering Farruca (the Miller’s Dance), one of de Falla’s most famous pages, with its proud, stamping rhythm; for the graceful dance of the Miller’s Wife; and for the comic, lumbering music of the pompous magistrate.

De Falla’s orchestration is brilliant throughout: listen for the guitar-like figurations, the snapping castanets and percussion, the sultry woodwind solos and the blazing full-orchestra climaxes, all evoking the Spanish idiom with a Frenchman’s precision of colour. The ballet builds to its tremendous final dance (Jota), a whirling, exuberant celebration as the magistrate is tossed in a blanket and the lovers reunited, bringing the evening to an irresistibly festive close.