Vocal

“Mrs. Caldwell speaks to her son” (Mrs. Caldwell habla con su hijo) is a wonderful, unique novel by 1989 Nobel prize winner, Camilo José Cela. Written from the view point of Mrs. Caldwell, an elderly English woman who had lost her son in the Aegean seas, the novel consists of 213 short entries in her diary, each one shows another aspect in her life and world and reveals an intense, almost incestuous love to her dead son. I chose 10 of the shorter entries in the book (no. 14b, 155, 9, 4, 63, 14, 44, 178, 210, 213), and slightly edited and adjusted them so they could be used as poetry. Although the novel has no conventional plot and is lacking a strict narrative line, we can observe that Mrs. Caldwell is slowly losing her remaining sanity (as in the strange, surreal song, “The Iceberg”)- as a result, the last 4 entries in her diary, of which I used two, “Air” and “Water”, are written from the Royal Insane Asylum. As each of the poems draws a rich, completely independent world of imagery and expression, the music, as a result, is extremely varied. Each song is a different character piece, sometimes commenting on the previous song, but always true to its unique mood and expression. Scales are present in all 10 songs- going upwards and downwards, hidden and exposed. While they sometime portray her hopes and dreams, scales are also ultimately drowning the heroine in her despair.