SOURCE: “Music as Sign and Symbol: Buero's Lázaro en el laberinto and Música cercana,” in Hispanofila, Vol. 120, No. 3, May, 1997, pp. 47–55.

[In the following essay, Halsey traces Buero Vallejo's use of music in Lázaro en el laberinto and Música cercana.]

Aesthetic beauty provides hints about inner meanings that discursive reason ignores or distorts. In Buero Vallejo's theater there is both revelation and concealment as the playwright speaks through art, music, metaphor and symbol, suggesting truths that transcend any totality of rational explanation. In many of Buero's plays music is important; however, in none is its role more central than in two of his very recent plays. The notes of the lute played by Coral in Lázaro en el laberinto (1986) and the melodies from the window across Alfredo's patio in Música cercana (1989) express deep truths, spiritual principles important to his entire theater.

In Lázaro en el laberinto the labyrinth of the title is the maze of doubts and fears that prevent the protagonist from finding the inner peace and freedom for which he longs. Lázaro is tormented by uncertainty as to his conduct some twenty-two years earlier, during the Franco dictatorship, when Silvia, the student he loved, was beaten by ultras. Lázaro remembers two different versions of the incident: in one he intervened to help her and in the other he abandoned her to save himself. Since Silvia then vanished and he was told that her parents had taken her out of the country, he could never learn which version was the true one. When a friend announces that he believes he has seen her in the city once again, Lázaro supposes that she will contact him. Although Lázaro's amnesia is most probably a way of avoiding an unpleasant reality, his loss of memory is not a conscious or willful one. Lost in his labyrinth of doubts, he now awaits the call of Silvia that can reveal the truth about a past that “pesa como una losa” (Díez de Revenga XIV) and, possibly, resurrect him like his Biblical namesake. One critic calls Lázaro's labyrinth “el de la memoria intrincada, el de un inconsciente que atormenta al librero. O la cavidad ósea del oído” (Haro Tecglen 31). For Lázaro suffers an auditory illusion; on several occasions he imagines a muffled telephone ring as he awaits Silvia's call. These auditory illusions are shared by the spectators, and their significance to the latter will become clear in the final scene.¹

The action is framed by music from Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro in E Flat Major played on the lute by Lázaro's niece Coral, who aspires to become a musician; and fragments of the composition are heard at various moments throughout the play. This music becomes associated in Lázaro's—and the spectators' mind with a place that possesses a special significance for various characters. Lázaro, Coral, and her brother Mariano, as well as Amparo, the young woman with whom the book dealer now believes he is in love and in whom he begins to see a new Ariadne who can lead him out of the maze, often stop at a bench in the secluded corner of a nearby park first discovered by Silvia:

un banco de jardín hacia el centro del primer término sobre el cual, a menudo, espejean y danzan suavemente los visos del agua, iluminada por el sol mañana y tarde, del invisible estanque situado en un apartado rincón del parque: un minúsculo lago tranquilo, apenas rizado por la brisa, a cuya orilla se halla el banco.

(43)

The poetry and mystery of this place, with the moving reflections off the water that create a strange atmosphere of damp brilliance, form a contrast to the prosaic reality of the bookstore and Amparo's shabby apartment and provide what Buero calls “la doble cara que … tiene el mejor teatro” (Amestoy 21).

The notes of the lute played by Coral are linked by Lázaro to the reflections off the water—just as in Buero's earlier La Fundación, Rossini's Pastoral from the Overture to William Tell is associated by the prisoner Tomás with the marvelous Turner landscape that he believes he sees outside a picture window.² In the opening scene of Lázaro, as we hear the first movement of Bach's Suite in E Flat Major for lute, the protagonist compares the musical notes that touch him with sound to the flecks of light on his body. He loves to hear the glints from the water, he states, as we see the slow dance of the lights. Lázaro explains to Coral that Silvia, who discovered the spot, “decía que, si sabemos verlas y escucharlas, las cosas nos hacen guiños. Los visos del agua eran para ella como guiños” (46). Later, when Amparo and Coral, who have stopped at the bench, are bathed in light, the former suggests in the same vein: “Si estos reflejos nos enseñasen el mañana … Si fuesen un lenguaje” (76).

In the secluded park corner Coral finds the peace and freedom that will allow her to fulfill her dream. Coral explains to Lázaro that she went to the park bench to calm her nerves before her concert and, caressed by the reflections off the water, played her best—as if she were another. Her uncle reassures her that, although fear conquered her at the recital, the miracle at the park bench is a sign that she will succeed the next time. No matter how nervous she may be, the faces and reactions of the spectators will not matter to her for she will be playing for the water on which she wishes to bestow her best music. And this music will come from the lute. As in his earlier La señal que se espera, in Lázaro “Buero llama a la puerta que da acceso al plano de lo artístico, en espera de respuestas, de signos” (Pajón Mecloy 15). Here as in the earlier play, music is a sign that points to liberation and self-fulfillment.³

Lázaro himself, however, does not attain this freedom; he remains trapped in his maze of doubts and fears. Later, when he and Amparo sit at the bench, where Lázaro has suggested the truth winks at them in flashes of light, Amparo reveals that she believes that fear prevented Lázaro from defending Silvia to the point of sacrifice and keeps him from remembering his cowardliness. He did not really love then, Amparo believes, any more than he loves now, despite the proposal of marriage he makes to her: “El que, en este mundo terrible no puede retorcerle el cuello a su miedo, ése … no puede amar” (150). Between letting Silvia be beaten and being beaten himself, Amparo believes that Lázaro chose the first and thus condemned himself to the labyrinth. When Lázaro finally learns that Silvia died shortly after the beating and when Amparo leaves him, there appears to be little hope left for him. It is too late. His doubts continue, as is evident in a final nightmare of the many he has experienced. We share this nightmare as we hear a dialogue between two masked figures who debate whether he approached them and whether they beat him or not when they attacked Silvia.

After Amparo rejects Lázaro's marriage proposal and leaves him, we once again hear the music of Bach: the gavotte from the suite for lute. In the brightness of a radiant morning Coral is seen playing, covered with glints from the water. Then, the notes of the lute grow fainter and finally die out completely even though she continues to play; and the telephone rings, plunging Lázaro into terror. The ringing then becomes louder and louder, awakening mysterious echoes in various parts of the theater as the spectators hear other telephones that ring in corners, under the seats, and from the rear and sides. Finally the lights dim, leaving visible only the glowing bench where a radiant Coral plucks her silent notes. A sudden blackout then plunges the theater into darkness and the telephones cease ringing all at once before the final curtain falls.

Lázaro has not been able to hear the notes of the lute because the telephone has rung once again; his conscience has once more summoned him to confront the truth of his guilt. Until he does so—and there is little reason to believe he ever will—, he will remain a prisoner in the labyrinth.⁴ For him it seems too late; he cannot experience the peace and freedom that are Coral's.

For the audience, however, there is hope. The melody of the eolian harp that sounds at the end of La señal que se espera as the signal that hope is possible is heard by the audience. This music is thus “última respuesta y apertura” (Paco, “Introducción” 32).⁵ However, Coral's music falls on deaf ears; for only after we answer the summons of our conscience can we exit the maze to find the freedom that she experiences. The persistent ringing that envelopes us in the final “immersion effect” calls us to re-examine our own conduct, to achieve greater insight into our past and our recollections of it, into the self-deceptions that torment us, either individually or collectively.⁶

Alfredo, the protagonist of Música cercana, is a ruthless financier whose fortune from sordid business deals permits him a life of luxury and privilege. Having reached middle age, however, he feels only emptiness and returns to his childhood home to live with his estranged daughter Sandra. He even dreams of going back to a past that once included the possibility of happiness with a young neighbor girl, Isolina, who sewed by her window across the courtyard from his and still plays on her phonograph the same music that her father put on for her when she was a child.

As in Lázaro, the protagonist of Música cercana is obsessed with memories of the past. Now, unrealistically, he longs to return to what could possibly have been—just as Lázaro does in a different way, as he sees in Amparo a new love, an Ariadne who can lead him out of his maze of fears. Alfredo's concern with the past is seen in his obsession with a video cassette he has made of himself, linking together photographs taken at various moments in his youth, and with the melodies that still sound across the courtyard and are associated with the window that seems to beckon to him from the past.⁷ Like Lázaro, Música is framed by music: the classical melodies that Alfredo heard as a child. As the curtain rises to reveal the financier showing his cassette to his daughter, we hear strains of the Adagio from Mozart's Concerto No. 1 for Flute and Orchestra in G Major that waft through the open window of his apartment. Shortly thereafter, as he explains the cassette to Sandra and René, the young South American revolutionary who she loves, the Allegro from Brahms's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in B Minor sounds, transporting Alfredo once again to the past.

On two occasions the audience shares this return to the past that Alfredo has lost, to the girl whom he perhaps could have made his wife had he not let the opportunity slip away. The first “immersion effect” is preceded by, or possibly begins with, the Adagio from Brahms's Quintet. Since the other characters at times hear and mention music from the courtyard, it is not certain whether the melody actually sounds or is only recalled by Alfredo. Then, after Alfredo turns on the video and stops it when reaching his image when he was twenty, the window across the courtyard is suddenly opened by a pretty girl of seventeen dressed in inexpensive old-fashioned clothes. After looking at Alfredo's window out of the corner of her eye, she sits down by the sill to sew. As the music grows in intensity, Alfredo, who still gazes at the video screen (which faces away from the spectators), remains lost in his memories until interrupted by the housekeeper. Then, without the girl's moving, the window to Alfredo's back silently closes. After all his business successes and beautiful women, only Isolina—to whom he has never spoken a word and who may or may not have returned his love in the past—and his daughter Sandra matter to Alfredo.

Alfredo, who married without love and has had a series of affairs, reveals his secret to Sandra: “Yo sí he sentido un verdadero amor. ¡Uno solo! Y nunca … me atreví a intentar que se realizase” (99). When he first saw Isolina, she was a charming child of six or seven who played with her dolls and occasionally glanced at the young boy across the courtyard: “De vez en cuando me lanzaba una miradita que me hacía temblar. Quiero creer que no era sólo coquetería, que también me quería un poquito” (100). From his window he watched her grow into womanhood as she listened to the melodies that now transport him mentally to the past. Alfredo, and most probably Lázaro, failed to say “yes” to love, to attempt to realize their most intimate dreams. The young Isolina represents the happiness Alfredo might have known. This first love is thus “el camino abandonado … el pasado perdido” (Barea 7). However Alfredo, like Lázaro, wants a second chance, even though he acknowledges that it is ridiculous to expect that Isolina has been waiting for him all her life, calling to him with her music. He explains to Sandra: “¿No sueñas tú con algo que también crees improbable? Me gustaría creer que esa mujer …, que esa música, tan distante y sin embargo tan cercana …, será un día mía” (102). Unlike Lázaro, Alfredo will receive a definitive answer at the end of the play.

Buero describes the melodies that enter Alfredo's window as “esa música que es poesía, que es lo auténtico, que es lo íntimo y que no es sólo música real, esa música que es cercana a todo ser humano y que dejamos a un lado” (Gopegui 9). The playwright states that we often choose not to heed this music, not to dare to attempt to make our dreams reality (Torres 38). Such was the case of Alfredo as a youth. Buero speaks of “músicas cercanas y distantes al mismo tiempo, a las cuales el protagonista debió atender más” (Larrauri 20). These melodies thus correspond to the notes of Coral's lute in Lázaro that are associated with the flecks of light off the water—which, according to Silvia, speak to us and perhaps show us the future. The notes of the lute in Lázaro and the melodies that now obsess Alfredo, like the distant harmony that envelopes the characters at the end of La señal que se espera, suggest the poetry or mystery of life, the inner and spiritual dimension so important to Buero's theater.

For a second time we share Alfredo's return to his childhood. As he shows the cassette, the room becomes submerged in the strange semi-shadow of memory, and Chopin's “Fantasie Impromptu” from Opus 66 is perceived—even though the window across the courtyard, is closed. Then, we see the charming neighbor girl who sews in the past as the magical “music window”⁸ silently opens again in Alfredo's mind, inviting him to pursue a love that is now improbable, to experience the happiness that he has never known. Noting that Alfredo has stopped the video cassette at the picture of himself at twenty, as if searching in a mirror for something lost, René comments on Alfredo's efforts to open a window onto a forgotten enigma, to attain to a revelation. He doubts that Alfredo's mirror will provide such a revelation and such is the case. Nevertheless, René suggests that if Alfredo expects an answer, they must wait as motionless and as quiet as his image on the screen. Part I ends as the three characters sit in silence as the soft music sounds and the neighbor sews at the window outside of time. This “bello momento teatral de silencio y de serenidad” (Johnston 43) recalls the final moment of La señal. However, unlike Alfredo, the characters of the latter play receive a sign that brings to each deeper understanding and hope for the future.

The answers that Alfredo receives involve not only Isolina but Sandra, who has rejected her father's values and now plans to leave home. In two nightmares accompanied by the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica, a composition which foreshadows the tragic conclusion of the play, we hear Alfredo beg Sandra to stay. In the second nightmare, René, also, voices his fears of losing her. The nightmares become reality when Sandra is fatally stabbed on the street by an addict. The same music underscores the announcement of her death. It is a death for which Alfredo finally realizes that he is ultimately responsible since he has funds invested in a financial group involved in laundering drug money.

Alfredo's final answer comes just before the play's end, when the real Isolina—not his mental image of her—appears for the first time in the window that opens as if beckoning to him from the past. As Mozart's Adagio sounds and the morning light floods the room, a woman with sewing in her hand opens the shutters to Isolina's window. Although it is the same woman who appeared earlier in Alfredo's memory, her appearance has changed noticeably: as she is now aged, with white hair and wrinkles. Surprised and annoyed, when she sees Alfredo observe her, she frowns. Then, as he softly whispers her name, she brusquely slams the window shut. The window to hope thus closes. Alfredo's effort to regain the past fails: “Queda tan en el aire como los temas de Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven o Chopin que Buero ha querido que estuviesen cercanas” (Amestoy 17). Neither Lázaro nor Alfredo had the courage to heed the music—so near but distant—when the opportunity presented itself at a given moment in their past, to try to realize their dreams.⁹ Mozart's Adagio, the same music tinged with melancholy that made Alfredo remember Isolina in the opening scene, continues to sound as the curtain falls, perhaps inviting the audience to really hear it for the first time. If Lázaro remains alone in the labyrinth without Silvia or Amparo, Alfredo is equally abandoned. The latter pinned his hopes on a route that led through a symbolic window to a past that can no longer be recovered. All escape is thus cut off; and liberation, an illusion.

Neither protagonist experiences the peace and freedom represented in Lázaro by the notes of the Bach suite played by Coral and by the reflections off the pond that touch the characters with light and speak in a special language. This secluded park corner, this magical spot, is an image that suggests the quiet center of the mind. True liberation, Buero suggests, is inner; and it is music that can help lead us to this liberation—if we can but hear it. In none of Buero's plays, however, is music more important than in the second play, where we see a protagonist who is as incapable of hearing the melodies that surround him—as are the spectators of Lázaro when Coral's notes fall on deaf ears. The compositions of Mozart, Brahms, Chopin, and Bach sounded on numerous occasions, but Alfredo failed to heed them and therefore lost his chance for happiness. The phonograph music from across the courtyard, like the melodies played on the lute, pointed to hope, to self-realization and, thus, authentic freedom. Here as in other Buero plays, music is “último signo de salvación y esperanza” (Paco, “Procedimientos formales” 50)¹⁰

Notes

1. The telephone rings that only Lázaro and the audience hear are examples of what critics of Buero's theater refer to as “immersion effects.” The term was coined by Ricardo Doménech. The device—Buero's answer to Bertold Brecht's Verfremdungseffeck or alienation effect—has been studied extensively by Victor Dixon, who states that it occurs when the “spectator is made to share a peculiar sensory perception (or lack of it), not with all the characters of a play but (normally) with only one, with whom he therefore feels a stronger sense of empathy or identification” (31).

2. Music is often used by Buero to introduce an “immersion effect,” to lead the audience to the awareness of a presence that is a mystery. In two other recent plays, La Fundación (1974) and Caimán (1986), music becomes associated with landscapes that, like the corner of the park in Lázaro, represent images of hope. In La Fundación Rossini's serene melody introduces, and becomes associated with, the idyllic landscape of mountains and lakes that the deluded prisoner imagines he sees from a comfortable room of a “foundation” for artists and writers.

   In Caimán, Schubert's incidental music for the romantic drama, Rosamunde, is not an “immersion effect” in the strict sense since the music exists objectively and is heard by other characters. Nevertheless, it suggests the romantic nature of the protagonist, Rosa, and the unreal world she inhabits when she contemplates a reproduction of one of Monet's large Water Lilies on her wall and hears the voice of her dead daughter invite her to join her in a fantastic water garden like the one in the painting. In both plays music “immerses” us in a mysterious presence. The Turner vista and the Monet garden are landscapes of the imagination that exist only in the delusions and hallucinations of the protagonists: the schizophrenic prisoner who cannot face the reality of his situation and the deranged mother who cannot accept the death of her daughter. Nevertheless, these landscapes are no less real when considered as ideals. The sparkling landscape that contrasts to the sordid reality of the prison, the brilliant water garden that stands in opposition to the reality of a society caught in the jaws of the monster, and the park are all images of hope. On landscapes in Buero's theater see Halsey.

3. In Buero's early La señal que se espera (1952), music is a “sign” that brings inner peace. Luis, a musician unable to compose since his sweetheart left him, expects that an aeolian harp that he has constructed will miraculously play a melody that he has forgotten as a “sign” that his work may begin again. The miracle happens—although the harp is played by human hands.

4. Buero considers it unlikely that Lázaro will resolve his doubts and confront his fear. See his comments in the interview with Amestoy, 23.

5. Speaking of Buero's El Concierto de San Ovidio (1964), Pajón Mecloy comments: “Valentín Haüy en el prólogo a El Concierto de San Ovidio decía: ‘Gusto de imaginar a veces si no será … la música … la única respuesta posible para algunas preguntas. …’. Ahora, en Lázaro en el laberinto, los visos del agua nos hacen guiños” (15).

6. In Lázaro Buero criticizes not only the protagonist (as he will also do in Música cercana) but also Spanish society for its refusal to recognize the errors of the past. The playwright states: “Lázaro con su memoria dañada responde a la memoria histórica del país. … Se trata de un doble recuerdo que está muy cerca de lo esquizofrénico sin serlo. En España, con referencia al pasado cada vez menos inmediato, hemos jugado mucho con nuestra memoria, tratando de engañarnos, incluso desde la subconsciencia, como Lázaro” (P[oblación] 37).

7. Buero states of Alfredo: “El ha tenido ahí, su faceta poética durante años y años, y la ha sentido, la ha hecho suya íntimamente, pero no se ha atrevido a darle realidad. Al final, esa larguísima espera en la que él ha vivido prácticamente toda su vida, por no haberla sabido llevar a los términos humanamente adecuados, se convierte en una decepción” (Gopegui 8).

8. The Music Window in the title of Holt's translation of Buero's play.

9. Mariano de Paco explains Buero's apparent harshness with both Lázaro and Alfredo: “En Lázaro en el laberinto y en Música cercana se plantea nuevamente una pregunta fundamental, una vez que Silvia murió y también ha muerto Sandra. ¿Quién rescata la muerte de David?, se interrogaba Valentin Haüy en El Concierto de San Ovidio. ¿Quién resucitará a Fermín?, decía Julia en Jueces en la noche. La que puede parecer extrema dureza con Lázaro o con Alfredo al concluir los dramas responde a estos hechos irreparables en el tiempo” (“La verdad, el tiempo y el recuerdo,” 44–45).

10. For studies of music in Buero's earlier theater see Borrás, García Lorenzo and Noble.

Works Cited

Amestoy, Ignacio. “‘Un verdadero hombre de teatro no es nunca un simple redactor de diálogos’: Una entrevista de Ignacio Amestoy.” Primer Acto 217 (Jan.-Feb. 1987): 16–23.

Barea, Pedro. “Música cercana: La memoria teatral de Buero Vallejo.” El Público 73 (Oct. 1989): 4–8.

Buero Vallejo, Antonio. Lázaro en el laberinto. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987.

———. The Music Window (Música cercana). Trans. Marion Peter Holt. University Park, PA: Estreno, 1994.

———. Música cercana. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990.

Díez de Revenga, Francisco Javier. “Lázaro en el laberinto: Renovación y continuidad de la cosmovisión tragica bueriana.” Anthropos 79 (1987): XIII–XIV.

Dixon, Victor. “The ‘Immersion-effect’ in the Plays of Antonio Buero Vallejo.” Themes in Drama II: Drama and Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 113–37.

Doménech, Ricardo. El teatro de Buero Vallejo. Madrid: Gredos, 1973.

García Lorenzo, Luciano. “Elementos paraverbales en el teatro de Antonio Buero Vallejo.” Estudios sobre Buero Vallejo. Ed. Mariano de Paco. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1984. 93–112.

Gopegui, Belén. “Toda obra es una experiencia nueva.” El Público 73 (Oct. 1989): 8–10.

Halsey, Martha T. “Landscapes of the Imagination: Images of Hope in the Theater of Buero Vallejo.” Hispania 68 (1985): 252–59.

Haro Tecglen, Eduardo. “Teatro: Lázaro en el laberinto: Un drama de conciencia freudiana.” El País (20 Dec. 1986): 31.

Johnston, David. “Introducción.” Buero Vallejo, Antonio. Música cercana. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1990. 9–47.

Larrauri, Eva. “Buero Vallejo: ‘El teatro español no está muerto.’” El Pais (18 Aug. 1989): 20.

Noble, Beth W. “Sound in the Plays of Buero Vallejo.” Hispania 41 (1958): 56–59.

Paco, Mariano de. “Introducción.” Buero Vallejo, Antonio. Lázaro en el laberinto. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987. 9–34.

———. “Procedimientos formales y simbólicos en el teatro de Buero Vallejo.” El teatro de Buero Vallejo: Texto y espectáculo. Ed. Cristóbal Cuevas García. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1990. 40–58.

———. “La verdad, el tiempo y el recuerdo: Lázaro en el laberinto y Música cercana.” Estreno 17.2 (1991): 43–45.

Pajón Mecloy, Enrique. “Buero Vallejo en el laberinto.” Ínsula 483 (Feb. 1987): 15.

P[oblación], F[élix]. “Un laberinto de Buero entre pasado y presente.” El Público 40 (Jan. 1987): 36–7.

Torres, Rosana. “Buero Vallejo: ‘Escribir me aburre penosamente.’” El País (22 Sept. 1989): 38.