Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) and the Aesthetics of his Age
Antonia Javiera CABRERA MUÑOZ
Original title: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) y la Estética de su Tiempo
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Aesthetics, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Renaissance.
Contrary to other writers in the Spanish Golden Age, such as Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) is considered as being an autodidact by experts. From the publication of La Galatea (1585) on, Cervantes begins to devote himself fully to Literature. His journey through several genres and subgenres makes him both pertaining and alien to his own time, since he starts to deal in his works with a variety of aesthetic topics (authorship, reading, literary creation, etc.) that put in question particularly the previous age, the Renaissacence. The aim of this study is to survey some of those aesthetic topics in Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), in order to establish Cervantes’s worldview as the author of the most ingenious work in Spanish Literature.
The Music in Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Antonia Javiera CABRERA MUÑOZ
Original title: La Música en el Don Quijote de Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Published in Music in Middle Ages and Early Modernity
Keywords: Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, Music.
This article deals with Music in the great work Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), written by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1615) during the Spanish Golden Age. In this relationship between the two Arts (Literature and Music) we emphasized the protagonist character of the work, Don Quixote de la Mancha, who, in both parts, gradually evolve his musical sense to see himself as a fully musical character in the second part: Music is present in various attitudes of his in several episodes, using the recitation and singing, instrumental, general knowledge and even dance to show their musical skills. Several authors have studied this relationship in detail, so that in this work we made a brief synthesis of some contents with the purpose of introducing the Brazilian reader to this relationship in Don Quixote, since in Brazil there is nothing published on the subject, as verified in the main research databases available to the general public and specialized. We begin with a brief synthesis of the life and work of Cervantes, highlighting his literary path to understand a little of his worldview as an intellectual; then we dedicate ourselves to his relationship with Music, the musical environment of his time and how the musical expression was introduced in his works; at once, we made a cut of Don Quixote musician, by highlighting some musical aspects that character shows. The analysis of Don Quixote showed that Music is as much pastoral as in the urban or contemporary to Cervantes. In reading the work, it was also verified that Music unfolds in three ways that correspond to its three outputs: in the first, the musical elements are scarce and simple and show, crudely, the contrast between what imagined by the knight and rural reality; in the second, the same happens as in the first, but little by little the gentleman is contemplating reality as it is and are the other characters who try to convince him that everything is a product of enchantments; in the third, Don Quixote assumes the role of musician in the manner of the knight-errant.
