24th July 2020 – Shabbat is almost here
And we come back to the eternal Bienvenida Aguado and this tragic story, kept alive since 1497 in the Sephardic diaspora
Hello! How are you? In this occasion we come back to the Sephardic legacy, with a lady that was already our protagonist in this edition of MBS. One of my very favourite female singers, Bienvenida Aguado, born in Çanakkale, Turkey, in 1929, settled in Israel from 1979 and passed away in 2016. I hope you’ll enjoy her unbelievable melismata and the sweet timbric of her voice.
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The greatest female singer of the Sephardi-Turkish style
There is not much information about Bienvenida Aguado, as she was not a chazzan, neither a professional singer. But we are lucky to have a bunch of recordings in audio and in video, made mainly by Susana Weich-Shahak. This picture is from one of the albums released with those recordings.
Bienvenida was born in Turkey and, despite that she moved to Israel in 1979, she returned to her native land every Summer, according to the booklet of the album Judeo-Spanish songs from the Eastern Mediterranean. Bienvenida Aguado and Loretta Gerassi.
Bienvenida sang both in Judeo-Spanish and in Turkish. Here you have an example of her singing in Turkish.
The song about the tragic story of the Duke of Gandía, murdered in his 19 years old
According to the booklet of the aforementioned album, written by the wonderful Edwin Seroussi, “the medieval Spanish romance continued its existence in the Sephardi oral tradition with significant modifications while retaining themes and the major structural characteristics of the Hispanic genre: lines of sixteen syllables (two hemistiches of eight syllables each), assonant rhymes and melodies of four short phrases covering two lines (four hemistiches) in forms like ABCD (like in this piece) or ABCDCD”.
The event mentioned in this song dates back to 1497 and tells the story of the murder of Juan de Borja y Cattanei, II Duke of Gandía (he is the man in the portrait). He was stabbed and his body was thrown to the river in Rome, when he was only 19 years old. The last time he was seen alive was in a place called the square of the Jews.
He was the firstborn favorite son of the pope Alexander VI and his preferred lover, Vannozza Cattanei, and brother of Cesare Borgia.
There are several hypothesis about the reason: the jealousy one, according to which his younger brother Jofré killed him because Juan was his wife’s lover, and the political one, that blames Cesare, who would take Juan’s place in the heart and the political plans of the Pope, their father. But, so far, this is an unsolved case and many other possibilities, like a punishment by enemies of their family, make also sense.
The song explains how the body of the Duke was found in the river by some poor fishermen. With no doubt, he was a rich and important person, because of the clothes he had. They though he was the son of a king. He had a ring in his finger that would make one hundred poor become rich. And the son of Alexander was been search…
If they returned him alive to his father, he would make them noble, and if they returned him dead, he would give them some presents.
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Click the picture to listen to La muerte del Duque de Gandía by Bienvenida Aguado:
I hope you’ll like it and, if so, feel free to share it and invite your friends to join us.
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Shabbat Shalom.
Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música