Aragón Televisión dedicated the program
La Posada de las Almas
last Sunday to
Francisco de Val,
an almost unknown composer and, nevertheless, the author of popular and well-known songs that have led and still have in his repertoire prominent performers.
Many were able to discover, for the first time, the hazardous life of the
author of
A tear fell in the sand,
How beautiful my girl is, Sierra de Luna (The Ebro is silent), Those green eyes,
Little
bells of the village,
Torito bravo,
It will be a rose
, and up to 300 more compositions of various genres such as Spanish song, tangos, boleros and jota couplets.
Hits that have sung, among other interpreters,
Antonio Machín,
Lolita Garrido, Rosita Ferrer, Gracia Montes, Jorge Sepúlveda,
Rocío Jurado,
Luis Mariano,
Peret
, Manolo Escobar or Isabel Pantoja.
Francisco de Val with Mikaela, a photo he dedicated to the mayor of Villafeliche.
They claim that he
was a close friend of Carlos Gardel
and that he was with the tenor Miguel Fleta at the time of his death.
Francisco García de Val was born in 1897 in the Zaragoza town of
Villafeliche
, known as the town of gunpowder for its mills that formed the Royal Gunpowder Factories.
At the age of three the family moved to the neighboring town of Jaulín, because his father,
Anacleto García, was the veterinarian.
In Jaulín he began to play the guitar and ran away from home, because his father
did not want him to be an artist.
When he turned 20, he was called to do his
military service,
stationed in Barcelona, something that changed his life and he
began to compose.
Poet, singer and composer, he wrote two books
Cantables y Poesías
y
Ángelus
, in 1932 and 1940, he recorded some albums, he was
successful in both Spain and America
and made songs for the cinema such as
Tango and the tornado happened
in the movie
Mercedes
;
Bells of the village
in
Paz
;
Path of oblivion
in the
Malagueña
;
o
Traveler
on the
Carousel
by José Luis Garcí.
LIVED TO THE FULL AND DIED POOR
His biographer Ramón Gaspar assures that he
made a lot of money from copyrights,
but since he was "very bohemian and
liked the game and the night, he
did not marry, which is why he was always partying. He was a man who lived to the fullest and
he died poor in
a seedy
boarding house
, after having had a footfall in the center of Madrid. So poor that it was sad, says a great tenor, and he would not allow them to invite him to a coffee ".
Francisco de Val died in Madrid in 1984 and is
buried in the ossuary of the Almudena cemetery.
In the aforementioned program, the mayor of Villafeliche, Agustín Caro, recalled that he only returned to the town on three occasions, once to request a birth certificate, another with a group of jota and he dedicated himself to hanging around the streets and the third
with Mikaela , an artist he planned to marry,
something that did not happen.
From that visit is the photo in which the two are together and that the composer dedicated to the mayor of the moment.
It is
one of the few that remains
more recent of him and that appears in publications such as the book
Francisco de Val, life, poetry and music
, by
José Ramón Gaspar and Patxi Mendiburru
that took the composer from oblivion and carried out an
investigation
on his poetic and musical work.
He is remembered as
a bohemian man, who was in Madrid,
through nightclubs and music publishers offering his songs.
Dressed in a white shirt,
a handkerchief around his neck
and another in his jacket pocket.
THE LAWSUIT WITH PERET
He did not know music, he composed the lyrics and the melody
and when he took it to a teacher to make the arrangements for the score, "they used to seize the musical rights. He knew it and he did not care, because deep down he was proud of rub shoulders with these people, but he was
the author ",
as Ramón Gaspar recalls.
There are at least two songs by Francisco de Val about whose authorship controversy has arisen.
In 1949, he composed the bolero,
Me asked for a kiss
, which Peret transformed in 1967 with the air of a rumba, into
A tear fell to the sand
.
Francisco de Val demanded his copyright
and the General Society of Authors
sued Peret,
who had to settle for appearing as a simple interpreter of said song.
And the controversy was settled.
However, Francisco de Val himself acknowledged that
Peret's arrangement was "the suit tailored to his melody"
and that it was the song with which he had collected the most royalties.
The other dispute refers to the authorship of
How beautiful is my girl
.
Florencio Ruiz Lara, with the stage name
Flores El Gaditano, born in Algeciras in 1921,
has always defended that this song is his.
However, those who have investigated the life and work of Francisco de Val have found
a book of poetry,
Angelus
,
published in early 1948, almost two years before Flores's claim, in which appears
How beautiful is my girl
like music,
with an air of habanera and bolero,
with the usual two stanzas and chorus and three more stanzas.
Since these arguments were presented in 2010, no one has proposed any other against it.
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