“Amor”

This chapter analyzes “Amor’s” operetta, explaining Diego’s use of stylistic innovations inspired by Cervantes. The misconception that Góngora’s work exerted a strong influence over Diego’s Fábula is addressed. The meaning of the time marker Góngora 1927 is clarified. Examples of influence from Cervantes’s early work, which was, in turn, inspired by the commedia dell’arte, are pointed out. Diego’s personifications of the two melodies, named Equis and Zeda, echo a slapstick joke, or lazzo, that Cervantes deploys in El Retablo de las maravillas. The operetta performance reflects the second stage of each of the poem’s three narrative levels: Equis endures a trial involving the deception inflicted by Romanticism’s “music of deception” and by Zeda, the personification of the second melody. With its beginning, middle and end, the performance reflects the Pythagorean meaning of the third number of the tetractys—the number three—that Diego thematically incorporates into “Amor”. The replication in “Amor” of the rhythmic variation and of the quotation technique found in Falla’s Concerto is analyzed. The chapter closes with a discussion of Diego’s canto paralelo, which parodies the secular love song, while respecting the noble voices from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to which it gives echo.