The horrified gasps from the audience that greeted Leonard Cohen’s collapse onstage at Valencia’s Velódromo Luis Puig during his recent tour of Spain spoke volumes for the singer-songwriter’s love affair with Spain. For one thing, this is no one-sided passion, since Cohen’s Spanish fans are as vociferous as any in the world.
Such is Cohen’s love for the country that he decided to spend over a week in Spain, performing in Madrid, Granada, Zaragoza, Vizkaya, Valencia and Barcelona during his seemingly endless world tour.
Forced back onstage following the theft of his retirement fund by an unscrupulous management company, Cohen has circumnavigated the globe over the past 12 months, yet it is by Spain’s cultural heritage that he has been most regularly inspired. When he turned 70 a lavish birthday celebration was held in his honour in Barcelona and he chose to celebrate his 75th by performing in that city’s Palau St. Jordi.
Cohen has been particularly lavish in his praise of Federico García Lorca, his creative hero and after whom he named his daughter, saying “She’s a lovely creature and very inventive. She really deserves the name.”
Perhaps Cohen’s most touching and long-lasting tribute to Spain is his painstaking musical translation of Lorca’s Little Viennese Waltz (“Pequeño vals vienés” from Poeta en Nueva York). Take This Waltz appears on the 1988 album I’m Your Man and is a fine example of one artist displaying a complete intellectual and emotional understanding of another. Cohen estimates that this labour of love took him 150 hours to achieve; the result of all this effort is a perfect six-minute marriage of lyrics and music in waltz time.
Ultimately the artistic partnership of Cohen and Lorca is a melancholic affair, which can only be expected of a songwriter who once observed, “I don’t consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin,” and a poet who claimed that, “Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanisation.”
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