| María Zambrano | Manuel Vicent | | Juan Carlos Marset |

| Marta Iglesias | Peridis | Ángel Ruiz | Siro 1 | Domingo García-Sabell | Siro 2 |

Since the Arts have gone their own way and gained their independence, the word, the thought, poetry, have been left without a voice. Music found traditional liturgies and meanwhile, the word found freedom and its own path. And thus it is that the great works of poetry have not found anything even near the voice that they deserve, except for some rare exception. The splendour of opera is at the cost of the poverty and even humiliation of the poetic word.

Previously, in Ancient Greece, thought was sung and even reading was taught to the music of the lyre. Sung poems were the basic texts of philosophical thought - Parmenides - in an intimate union. And prayer, speaking now in the sphere of Catholicism, had to be spoken out loud. And the sighs and the sobbing of eucharistic ecstasy were to be heard alongside the human sounds coming from the small square. And the warbling of birds could be heard mixed up with the cry of pain which saves the anguish. And this is what takes place in the Canticle of St. John of the Cross when it is sung by Amancio Prada. Where you can hear the silences of the Segovian night, of that unique night, born of the memory in love. The flow of transparent time where a poem appears, at the very peak of poetry in our language, so a universal peak. Not one word goes past us as we so privilegedly make its acquaintance in its miraculous present. He does not lose his way in its beauty, nor lose his head in his voice, not for one moment. Music and voice do not appear as added on appendages, but as extracted from the poem itself. It is a marriage of word and musicality. And of something more inaudible no doubt. A marriage which is celebrated there, in the "risen caverns of stone", "to the mountainside and to the mountain pass whence springs pure water". Some drops of that water drunk from that secret source infuse this song of Amancio Prada´s with life.

María Zambrano

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MYTHICAL SINGER

The effect of Amancio Prada´s voice is expressed by the words used, in ancient times, to describe certain legendary singers: to the sound of his voice beasts are pacified, rivers change their course, stones and trees descend from hilltops. Even the latter, moved like wounded snakes or caged birds, are unable to resist the call. They search for a new perspective beside the musical flower which is offered to them and are, in turn, enraptured. Transported by the resonant calyx of his well-tuned voice, into who knows what original tonality. A pure sensuous vision, lit by the intimate and unusual, luciferous musical word. The voice takes flight and his singing surpasses the fluttering wings of the songs. Amancio Prada, a genuine poet creator, officiates with his singing the timeless rite of the disembodied soul which seeks death in sublimity. Tearing from the body every last vestige of death, which is carried along with the singing into the dreamland of non death, to make him in turn revive into that life which still remains. The melancholy mania is unravelled in these songs, which are fastened solely with the melodic magic of the voice. The song is cast in a unique alloy, a closed mineral breath, injured, boiling, almost to the point of achieving the alchemised fusion of an immortal voice´s timbre; which recognises itself clearly and is different from all the other (both mortal and immortal) voices.

Amancio Prada, a mythical singer, his voice stands always at the margin or beyond his own songs. So also were those poets which sowed with a multitude of forms and divinities (subterranean, marine and aerial) the thought and life of adolescent humanity. Today, irremediably far from the primordial age, it is after this fashion that the best exponent of that magnificent lineage, which was taught by Apollo the mysterious language of the lyre, is known to us. Singer of pure songs, he stresses the depth of every note and word, until the song transcends itself. Transcending, also, all that which had become fused with it.

Juan Carlos Marset

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The voice of Amancio Prada, which emerges from a burning lyricism, forces you to close your eyes, and very soon a distant memory, of a Renaissance complexion, fills your interior light with poplars and the flight of falcons, with embroidering maidens and the sound of illuminated monks. A lark sings in the cypress of the abbey. Hunters in doublets track woodcocks. There are deer wounded in the green brooks, the bubbling streams are still virginal, the herds are full of the long lowing sounds of silence, and everything smells of hay and wholewheat bread. What is about this young, blue man? You could say what everyone does, that Amancio Prada is a troubadour: you can imagine him at the foot of the window lattice, in the ancient stone squares or camped outside the city walls in the wagon of the travelling comedians, plunged in a solitude which reflects the fleeces of the animals and the anvils of the blacksmith, even if he is now on the stage of a theatre packed with a modern audience singing sweet anarchic things by García Calvo. But it doesn´t matter. A simple line by Lope de Vega takes him back to his origins. A Gallician sung canticle, a Christmas carol, a lullaby or a sonatina by Juan Ramón Jiménez take charge of him once again for the imagination of olden times. The voice of Amancio Prada, lightly burnt by mysticism at its peak, recites the music, makes the melody spring forth in a syllabic and crystalline way. There is something of the codex in it, of the book of hours or of the chant of the palace. This young man from El Bierzo, with his clear face, the son of agricultural workers, who sang as a small child in the church choir and was a singer with village orchestras, aired his aesthetic modernity for the first time in Paris amidst the mythology of that May; he came back from there to the land of cattle herding, a man of a gentle rebelliousness possessed by spirituality. Since then, he has been working hard at extracting the very soul, in its very purest tonality, from the sound of the cultural and popular memory. Ancient and modern poets have tied their cadences to a spotless voice which forces you to close your eyes. Amancio Prada sings, and birds from medieval times fly out, and, after each song, the audiences who pack the recital have the taste of pomegranate juice on their lips.

Manuel Vicent

A Coruña, 8-VIII-95

Mi querido amigo,

(...) A propósito de Ernst Jünger. Allí estuvimos tú y yo en la ceremonia de la investidura del escritor como doctor "honoris causa". ¡Qué feliz coincidencia! Verás por qué.
  
Jünger ha acertado a definir la música  –si es que puede ser definida– con acierto y sutileza simultáneas cuando afirmó que el lenguaje musical nos lleva no sólo a las fronteras de las palabras, sino, además, a las de la percepción, ("Der Musik führt nicht nur an die Grenzem des Wortes, sondern an die Warnehmung"). Y más adelante añadió que la obra de arte se alcanza cuando llega a esos límites y aún amaga con superarlos. Entonces ello suscita "un arrobamiento e incluso temblor", ("einen Schauer und selbst ein Schaudern").  Llegando a este extremo, dice algo que, según yo pienso, es definitivo. Y, desde luego, totalmente aplicable a tu arte, a saber, que, en última instancia, no se trata de insuflar vida a la materia, sino de reconocer la vida que hay en ella y ponerla en libertad. Por eso "en toda gran obra se engendra una resurrección", (Auferstehung ist daher in jeden grossen Werk").

(...) Es la de la emboscadura, el resultado de perderse en el bosque, excepcional y generoso regalador de toda personal autonomía con potencia suscitadora de nuevas realidades, esto es, con capacidad de fecundar la oculta realidad. Para demostrarlo he ahí la resurrección que operas en los versos cunqueirianos y en los de San Juan de la Cruz.

Crear es el más alto grado de realización a que puede llegar la criatura humana. Con lo cual, además, conquistas alturas nunca antes conquistadas. Atrás quedan las chabacanerías del mal folclore, atrás quedan toda casta de vulgaridades. Hay, pues, en tu obra, una  verdadera recuperación. Y, cómo no, una liberación. Andamos sumergidos en vulgaridades artísticas y en falsedades creadoras. Tu empresa gana, así, un complemento de transcendencia. Y de permanencia. ¿Recuerdas los versos de Hölderlin?: "Lo que los poetas fundan eso es lo que permanece".

(...)  Solía decir don Ramón del Valle-Inclán que "crear belleza es acertar con el punto de la eternidad". En esa ideal e inalcanzable diana has clavado tú poemas y armonías sin cuento. Y sigues con eso la intuición de Schopenhauer  –creo que fue Schopenhauer– cuando afirmaba que la música nos entrega "el corazón de las cosas". Y esto, justamente esto, es lo que las palabras y los "sones bien concertados" de tu inspiración han metido dentro de mi alma.

(....) Muchas más cosas podría decirte pero me temo que excederían el contenido de una carta. El contenido de una gratitud. Muchas gracias pues. Y un cordial abrazo de tu siempre amigo y siempre admirador.