In 1940 my grandmother on my mother’s side worked as an extra in a film featuring Libertad Lamarque (pic). The name of that film is Cita en la Frontera (translatable as ‘Meeting/Date/Encounter At The Border’) and it is an early movie by Lamarque who eventually became one of the biggest movie stars of the Spanish-speaking world. Probably intoxicated by the glamour of the experience, my grandmother decided to adopt the artistic name of Libertad Del Río (‘Libertad’ out of admiration for Lamarque). Unfortunately, my grandma’s acting career started and ended with Cita En La Frontera and she never got to put her lovely stage name to use.
The sung text in the piece is a re-working of three songs from Cita En La Frontera. For the first madrigal I used Riendo, for the second Cita en la Frontera and for the last one Un Amor. The lyrics of these tangos are quite stereotypical in their depiction of longing and suffering. The spoken text in Tres Madrigales comes from a climactic scene in the movie where two characters (Luisa and Chunguita) have a heated exchange with regards to Luisa moving in to Chunguita’s family home.
Until I recently watched Cita..., I wasn’t aware of the extent to which films of this time could be reminiscent of both of my grandmothers’ mannerisms, body language, and specially their singing voice. Seeing and hearing Lamarque performing brought back vivid memories of them, of the environment of their homes when we visited, of certain family rituals in my childhood. Tres Madrigales is both an oneiric an nostalgic account of those days.