Ancho es el mar

The Cor de la Generalitat Valenciana was preparing a concert with its female voices, devoted to music and texts written by women throughout history, and they asked me for a piece on a text by a member of the Generation of ’27. I chose Concha Méndez for this poem: a farewell in very turbulent times, somewhere between a love letter, longing, hope and doubt.

Setting it to music overwhelmed me a little, because I don’t know what living through something like that is like. So I tried to treat the text honestly: no repeated lines, no playing with the words. The poem is heard whole, from beginning to end, once.

Concha Méndez had to leave Spain after the Civil War, lived the rest of her life in Mexico, and her work went largely unrecognised back home. I wrote to her family to ask permission to use the text, and they replied in less than a day, with one of the warmest emails I’ve ever received: all they cared about was that Concha’s work be known and appreciated.