cThey say that he saw her leaning out on a balcony and was captivated, as if struck by lightning. They say it, but it wasn’t like that. He met Julia Espín at the home of the zarzuela composer and director of the Teatro Real Choirs, Joaquín Espín, a very well-connected character in the Madrid cultural life.
Musicians, scriptwriters and journalists, such as the young Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, attended the gatherings at his house. In that salon he met Julia, who later became a soprano and sang at the Scala in Milan. And he fell in love with her. It is believed that Julia is the owner of the blue pupil in the poem «What is poetry?, you say while you stick/ your blue pupil into my pupil;/ What is poetry! And you ask me? / Poetry… it’s you.
The thing about the balcony was said because that scene of the unknown woman and captivating interview from a distance is very romantic. And Bécquer is the image, the archetype, of the writer of Romanticism in Spain: in love, poet, bohemian, without money, and with a tragic destiny, dying very young. In all of this there are truths and lies.
Joan Estruch Tobella, philologist, historian and Becquerian expert, is one of those who demystifies this portrait of the poet as a perfect romantic model. An image of Bécquer has prevailed that personifies “all the clichés of homely sentimentality that he himself had mocked,” he says. The bohemian image of a suffering lover, of an angelic dreamer, was fostered by Bécquer’s friends after his death in 1870. He died young – he was 34 years old – but not of tuberculosis, as has been said – perhaps because it is the disease of Romanticism – , but pneumonia.
Your friends to the rescue
Upon returning from his funeral, his friends met at the house of the painter José Casado del Alisal and organized a collection to publish his complete work (Rhymes, Legends, articles…) and that the proceeds went to Bécquer’s widow, Casta Esteban, and his three sons, Gregorio Gustavo Adolfo, Jorge and Emilio Eusebio.
Until then Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer had published only 15 of his 76 in the newspapers. Rhymes, poems about poetic creation, love and death, which contain famous verses (“I am hot, I am dark, I am the symbol of passion…” and many others) dedicated to idealized, non-existent women, and to two real ones : Julia Espín y Casta, his wife, with whom he had a tortuous marriage. They ended up separated and it was rumored that the little son was not Bécquer’s, although he recognized it… The poet of love did not have a happy love life.
The Rhymes, which are one of the most well-known and recited poems by Spaniards, were disordered by Bécquer’s friends and this confuses many readers, who believe that the poems follow the biographical order of their author. If you think like this, you don’t understand the emotional swings of the poet, who quickly becomes excited because “today I saw her… I saw her and she looked at me… / today I believe in God!”, as he laments that “my life It is a wasteland, / a flower that I touch sheds its leaves…”
His friends messed up his verses, yes, but they boosted Bécquer’s fame. The king, Amadeo I, headed the list of subscribers to that posthumous publication with a generous contribution of one thousand reales. The edition was a success. “Galdós, then a journalist in Madrid, was one of the first to review the work,” says Jesús Rubio Jiménez, professor of Spanish Philology at the University of Zaragoza and Becquerian expert.
When Gustavo Adolfo died, his friends made a fundraiser to publish his work. It was a success: even King Amadeo I put money
In the prologue of those Plays, which came out in 1871, Ramón Rodríguez Correa drew the romantic portrait of Bécquer that has survived in the Spanish imagination. Joan Estruch Tobella assures that this prologue hid Bécquer’s political militancy (a fervent conservative) or his professionalism as a journalist. This expert affirms that the Sevillian writer was a disciplined journalist, although that image, almost of an office worker with a visor and muffs, is not as romantic as that of the impoverished poet in an attic. «Bécquer was not a marginal author. He was not despised or misunderstood by his contemporaries, but rather admitted into literary circles and into the spheres of power,” says Estruch Tobella.
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer was romantic, but not that romantic. He is the poet of swallows (“The dark swallows will return to your balcony and hang their nests…”, thus begins one of his Rhymes most famous), but he was also an acidic political commentator, essayist and satirical author. He even had a surreal streak. In the albums of Julia Espín – with whom he was in love, but it is not known for sure if it was reciprocated – some ‘bizarre drawings’ (as experts define them) made by Bécquer have been found in which skeletons play tennis. with a skull as a ball. Death and fatality are very Romantic themes, but such grotesque drawings are shocking.
Bécquer was born in Seville in 1836, in the middle of the Romantic era. He was the son of Joaquín Domínguez, a somewhat successful painter of manners. Bécquer was his fifth surname and comes from a Flemish ancestor who settled in Seville in the 16th century. Gustavo Adolfo grew up in a large family interested in painting, music and literature. But tragedy came soon: when he was five years old, his father died; At 11 he also lost his mother and the eight orphans were left in the care of different relatives.
At 18 he went to Madrid. He is a wounded young man full of projects who arrives in the capital with “the eyes of a dazed provincial idealist,” according to Professor of Spanish Literature Ángeles Cardona. In Madrid there are the gatherings and cafes; new publications flood the newsstands: there is an incipient cultural industry in which Gustavo Adolfo and his inseparable brother Valeriano, who is a painter, want to participate.
Bécquer was, in reality, a disciplined and conservative journalist. But the image of an office worker with muffs does not fit the ideal of a romantic poet.
The Bécquer brothers enter the gatherings where bourgeois and aristocrats talk about the railway, while strikes take place in Barcelona, and misery in the slums and peasant uprisings spread. In the Madrid salons Gustavo Adolfo meets Augusto Ferrán Forniés, a translator, who introduces him to the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Lord Byron, ‘fathers’ of Romanticism. Thus, the young Bécquer adds to his classicist and Sevillian customs foundations impossible loves, the transience of humanity, lost paradises, the force of destiny… the canonical romantic ingredients.
The Bécquer brothers make their way into Madrid’s bohemia. They make important contacts. Gustavo Adolfo became intimate with Luis González Bravo (later minister and president of the Government) and he opened many doors for him. The writer manages to undertake the encyclopedic project of writing a History of the temples of Spain (which he could not finish) and begins to write in newspapers. Being a journalist is a crucial facet for Bécquer: he fed him. He was director of The Contemporaryfrom the satirical experiment Dona Manuela; of the weekly The Enlightenment of Madrid; from the theater magazine The intermissionand wrote in The time, The Universal Museum…
Politics also threw him. He spoke out, he got into scuffles… he even had a position, censor of novels. It was provided to him by his friend González Bravo. As was usual in those times of government dances and layoffs, he was it, he stopped being it and he became it again.
Were he and Valeriano the authors of The Bourbons in ball, the scandalous watercolors that showed Queen Elizabeth II in full sexual orgies? The fact that they were signed with the pseudonym Sem has led us to think that it was them because that is how they signed several satirical daring statements, but Julio Rubio Jiménez rules out their authorship in these ribald plates.
The authorship of ‘Los Borbones en pelota’, pornographic watercolors that showed Queen Isabel II in orgies, has been attributed to the Bécquer brothers.
Bécquer was a hard-working man. In addition to journalistic texts (about shows and varieties, reviews, articles…), he exercised criticism (Literary letters to a woman) and was the author of theater and zarzuela librettos (in collaboration with others) and of the most varied reflections (Letters from my cell).
The secret of your success
Bécquer was a straggler from Romanticism, like Rosalía de Castro. He was a contemporary of Campoamor or Espronceda and of realist authors such as José María de Pereda or Juan Valera. His literature triumphed at the height of realism: until 1907, six editions of his complete works were published and they were praised by Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán.
Why is he one of the best-known Spanish poets? According to Luis Cernuda, because he created “a new tradition.” According to Ángeles Cardona, because he achieves a peculiar fusion between lied German and Andalusian folklore. There are resonances of seguiriyas, soleás and coplas in his poems. And in them are announced – says this professor – “the painful echoes of Antonio Machado and the color and grace of Juan Ramón Jiménez.” Bécquer would have loved the comment because poetry was one of the axes of his life: «There may not be poets; but there will always be poetry », he wrote.