Sor | Las quejas de Maruja for voice and piano | PDF Download

TECLA X 10148
Sor | Las quejas de Maruja for voice and piano
PDF Download

*This title is also available separately in print format TECLA 0154.

Sor’s song “Las quejas de Maruja” is presented here in a new re-engraved digital edition with piano accompaniment. This song is unique in Sor’s output because of its remarkable syncopated rhythm, and in its earliest editions it is called a “canción andaluza”. Sor lived for many years in Andalucia, and it may be that this song preserves for us something of the native rhythms of Andalucia of that time.

Sor’s “Las quejas de Maruja” is a song in which a girl called Maruja complains of her lover’s indifference: he just talks to his friends rather than attending to her, “me estás asando / con tu frialdad”, and the last words are:

Reniego del alma
Que pueda aguantar
Querer que parece
Querer olvidar.

Short and rapid musical phrases with a deliberately monotonous bass give the impression of a comic patter song. The rhythm is remarkable and the accompaniment for piano or guitar eloquent. Beware of the tempo indication Andantino: it may have meant faster than we would think of it today, and I personally hear this piece as fairly fast, because of the rhythm.

We first hear of “Las quejas de Maruja” in 1838 in a Madrid newspaper when it was announced as a “nueva canción andaluza . . . por Sor”. The date is late, but the attribution to Sor is firm. Then in 1841 it appeared as one of six songs in a publication called La Sal de España. For more on the early editions, see the catalogue of works in my book Fernando Sor Composer and Guitarist.

In 1822 in London Sor wrote a song “Should a pretty Spanish lass” for performance in the “Opera” Gil Blas, with the same characteristic rhythm as “Las quejas de Maruja”, which reinforces the idea that “Las quejas de Maruja” is indeed genuinely by Sor; and again in the movement “dans le genre espagnol” in his Fantaisie for two guitars op. 54 bis.

Singers may like to know that the vocal line is slightly different in a 19th-century score of this song with piano which has at the foot of its last page “Calcog[rafia] de A Ruiz” of which a copy can be found in Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. Singers might wish to consult it and decide which version suits his or her voice better.

• Model: TECLA X 10148 - DL
• Manufactured by: Tecla
• Condition: New