A 20th Century Masterpiece for Flute and Piano from Chile

Chilean composer René Amengual was born in 1911 in Santiago de Chile. At the age of twelve, in 1923 he entered the National Conservatory, where he studied piano with Rosita Renard (1894-1949) and composition with Pedro Humberto Allende (1885-1959). Upon finishing his studies in 1935, Amengual began a career as an educator in the Conservatory, which would be uninterrupted until his death in 1954.

In 1945, Chile’s Institute of Musical Extension (IME) invited the American composer, conductor and flutist (formerly a member of the Chicago Symphony), David Van Vactor (1906-94), to conduct that country’s national symphony in a series of concerts that would feature the music of North America. In addition, he was to direct a series of chamber music concerts and teach a class in instrumental and choral ensembles in the National Conservatory. Particularly because of the latter, not long after arriving in Santiago he developed a relationship with René Amengual, who at that time was professor of composition in the Conservatory and also the director of the IME chamber music program.

Indeed, within a relatively short amount of time, Amengual had not only composed his Pequeña Suite (Little Suite) for the North American flutist, but the two of them had also premiered the work on June 11 on the season’s fifth chamber music program. For his part, Van Vactor composed a Sonatina for flute and piano that was likewise performed for the first time during the same event. Amengual accompanied both pieces at the piano.¹⁾Accompanied by Barbara Schreier, Van Vactor also performed the Little Suite on March 17, 1946, in Kansas City, Missouri, on a program sponsored by Sigma Alpha Iota.

Writing in Revista Musical Chilena, an unnamed critic was effusive in his praise for Van Vactor, both as a composer and as a flutist.²⁾“Conciertos,” Revista Musical Chilena 1/3 (July 1945):  38. However, in what was surely disappointing to the Chilean composer, the critic found little to commend about Amengual’s Little Suite:  “This work, a little unequal in the style of its four movements, that go from an impressionistic prelude—at least due to its harmonic color—to a Baroque Courante and Aria, to end in a very contemporary Ragtime, belongs to the kind of Amengual’s minor works of a more delicate nature. But it suffers a little bit from a certain improvisatory character that dominates it.”

Although Amengual and other contemporaneous Chilean composers were influenced by Ravelian impressionism—and throughout this suite there are indeed many elements that can be characterized as impressionistic—the prevailing force behind this work, nevertheless, is neo classicism, which was a stylistic trend that had begun to gain adherents in Chile during the late 1910s. Therefore, there are structures that are imitative (Courante), or, are bi-partite (Aria). In addition, Vicente Salas Viú notes that the flute’s lyrical melody in the Aria is accompanied at the piano by something akin to an ostinato.³⁾Vicente Salas Viú, La creación musical en Chile, 1900-1951. (Santiago, Chile: Biblioteca Digital de la Universidad de Chile, 2001), 71-72. At the same time, however, although Amengual uses an extended harmonic palette that consists of unlikely pedal tones, suspensions or respellings of notes and chords, he is clearly working within a tonal system. For example, even though the Preludio (the first movement) reaches the tonic area (A major) in measure 17 and sustains it with pedal tones in both the flute and piano, it is finally affirmed by a plagal cadence that occurs three measures later [Example 1]. Similarly, the concluding measures of each of the other three movements also show a clear dominant to tonic relationship. Lastly, it would seem that at least one audience member (the above-referenced unnamed critic) either did not appreciate the jazz-like characteristics of the piece or found them to be completely inappropriate. In either case, however, it is perfectly natural to suppose that Amengual had turned to stylistic elements that he thought would clearly honor the North American musician.

In 1954, Miguel Aguilar penned an evaluation of Amengual’s musical style that was published shortly after the latter’s unexpected death that had occurred just a few months before.⁴⁾Miguel Aguilar, “Evolución estilística en la obra de René Amengual,” Revista Musical Chilena 9/47 (1954): 14-15. By this point in his compositional career, it had become possible to identify his violin sonata (1943-44) and the Little Suite as the first two works to signal the beginning of Amengual’s third phase of composition. Of the two, Aguilar finds that the latter work “responds more precisely to the new models” that Amengual had turned to in order to not only purge Ravelian elements but also to settle on a type of musical expression that is both more concise and self-contained.

This notwithstanding, by describing the Little Suite as “incidental and insignificant,” Aguilar fails to recognize that the true significance of a work is not solely defined by its relationship to major compositions, such as symphonies, concertos or string quartets. Rather, Amengual’s Little Suite is one of but a smattering of examples—mostly from Brazil and Chile—of Latin American composition for flute and piano from the 1940s, and as such, provides an important point of reference as to how contemporaneous Latin American composers accommodated their stylistic predilections within the more intimate context of a work for a solo wind instrument and piano.

John L. Walker