We looked for it first in the pages of the magazine CD Compact. He signed with a pseudonym, but we all knew it was him. His reviews always went beyond the mere list of technical and expressive virtues or defects on interpretation, opened doors, illuminated rooms, left bread crumbs on the path that we, the newly initiated, followed with delight. That is the task of critical. This is how the gusto.
Years passed, CD Compact disappeared and it was difficult to find his signature on musical themes, perhaps from time to time a review or a controversial article in The country. He then he began to write monthly columns in Scherzo. And until today.
This volume published in Debate with edition of Andrew James returns us to lucid thought and to the always profound reading that Félix de Azúa makes of musical themes, be it in lectures on the Orpheus of Monteverdi, Bruckner o Debussy or in a column that takes advantage of a discoand booka ephemerisand concert lived to return to some of its constants: the relationships between music and other artestheir interactions with the philosophy and the sciencesthe conflicts of the modernitywith its derivations sociological and even ethicsthe clash of the vanguards with the public (and here his well-spread –in his day– polemics with Sanchez Verdu, Christopher Halffter o Stephen Plaistow), the dialectics between music and word that caused a decisive caesura at the beginning of the 17th century, the search in music for its magical roots, shamanic (and in this it reminds me so much of some of the things you have written Ted Joy)…
Music is certainly an inexhaustible subject and it is a luxury to go through its thousand forks and esplanades, the busiest and most secluded, through the inquisitive verb, clear, luminous of one of the great personalities of Spanish culture today.
