Unspoken Poetry: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Platero y Yo by Maureen Buja September 18th, 2025
The Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) made his career as an active pianist, critic, and composer starting in the 1920s. In 1922, at the first International Festival of Contemporary Music, he joined fellow Italian composers Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), and his teacher, Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), in showing the world what musical innovations were coming out of Italy.
He was commissioned by violinist Jascha Heifetz for a violin concerto, and he also composed a cello concerto for Gregor Piatigorsky. Both works were given their premieres in New York with Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic. With the rise of fascism in Italy, his musical world became more constrained. In 1938, a performance of the violin concerto by the Turin Radio Orchestra was cancelled because of its ‘Hebraic flavour’. Forbidden from teaching, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and family emigrated to the US, with the help of Toscanini and Heifetz. He became an American citizen in 1948.
When it became too difficult to become a name in New York, he moved to California and started working for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941. The entry of the US into WWII in December 1941 put him under scrutiny as an ‘enemy alien’ because of his Italian lineage. Limited from travelling more than 15 miles from home, Castelnuovo-Tedesco took up private teaching and some of the greatest of film composers, including Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Nelson Riddle, and Jerry Fielding, as well as his personal favourite, André Previn.
He worked extensively with the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia, meeting first in 1932. That meeting at the International Festival of Contemporary Music in Venice resulted in the Variations à travers les siècles (Variations Through the Centuries), Op. 71. The guitarist asked the composer for another work the following year, something larger… That led to a 50-year collaboration where Castelnuovo-Tedesco would write a new work each year for Segovia’s birthday, including the famous Guitar Concerto, Op. 99.
Platero y Yo (Platero and Me) is a set of 138 prose poems all about the shared life of the poet and his beloved donkey, Platero (Silvery). The poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958), was considered one of Spain’s leading poets in the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. He was born in the town of Moguer, which is the setting for Platero y Yo.
Written in 1914, the stories are set in the town of Moguer, which had been a thriving Andalusian town until 1910 when its vineyards fell to a wine disease and its harbour became silted up from the nearby Rio Tinto mine. Jiménez moved from the town in 1912, and first moved to Madrid before being driven to the US by the Spanish Civil War.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco started his work on Platero y Yo in 1960, intending to have the prose poems and the music used as accompaniments to the recitation. The setting of the music rises above its role as a simple accompaniment and has had greater success as a standalone guitar cycle.
The guitar cycle of 28 pieces, set as 4 groups of 7, does not necessarily follow a narrative stream. Platero’s death in No. 21 is followed by his reappearance at the author’s window in No. 22, perhaps as a ghost, but certainly braying in his stall in the next paragraph and appearing in the Carnival in No. 27, dressed in his finery of a Moorish harness.
The performance by Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen (b. 1989) is sure and humour-filled. Castelnuovo-Tedesco is ready to read the smallest nuances into the poetry, from the flights of birds to butterflies, and the drama of Platero’s death (of overeating), complete with knocking Death (perhaps?), and Johansen picks them up perfectly. The complete work is nearly 2 hours long, and it is called ‘the longest solo work in guitar literature’.
The booklet is indispensable, as it includes the prose poems plus illustrations of the stories by Halfdan Pisket, a cartoonist working in Denmark.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Platero y Yo: An Andalusian ElegyNiklas Johansen, guitarOUR Recording 8.226930-31