History of the Songs
"The Basque is always singing everywhere: at home, in church, in the street, in the country side. He sings whether he is happy or sad, whether crouched to scythe meadows of regularly sweeping bracken, or trampling apples in the cider press".
Father Donostia, musicologist
Numerous aspects of the community’s life are evoked through traditional Basque songs. The most ancient would be songs of quest, most often linked to highpoints of the year (Christmas, New Year, Saint Agathe, Carnaval, Saint John). Excerpts of a few war songs, relating great historical deeds, managed to reach their compiler: this is the case of the Song of Beotibar, which describes, in close to epic form, one of the bloody episodes of the mediaeval wars in the Basque Country, the combat of Beotibar against Guipuzcoans and Navarra in 1321.
But of these mediaeval songs that have miraculously come down to us, the Berterretxen khantoria (Song of Berterretxe), a Souletin complaint of the 15th century, is unquestionably one of the best preserved, and most moving. Set against the feud of the Beaumonts and the Gramonts, it narrates the assassination of Berterretxe, a young man from Larrau, whose killing was ordered by the Count of Beaumont. It was published for the first time by J.D. J. Sallaberry, in his volume of 1870. Love songs, abundant in the repertoire, seem for the most part to have been later in origin. Their use of metaphor is constant –the most frequently used symboles being the bird, the star, or the flower– and, as points out Jon Bagües, Director of the Basque Music Archive Centre in Renteria (Guipuzcoa), "they are often a blend of personal testimony and outpourings of love with considerations of society at large". A spirit of sarcams and mockery is not absent from popular poetry and satiric songs abound, at all epochs, on the subject of isolated events and everyday misadventures, when they are not criticising the supposed upholders of law and discipline.
There are also numerous songs of exile, born of those vast waves of emigration to the American continent which were to radically transform the whole of Basque society in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries. Obliged most often for economic or political reasons to take up exile? Basques would express their nostalgia for their homeland in these songs. The religious canticle has quite a special place in this oral heritage. This was transmitted orally during liturgical ceremonies for, as José Antonio Arana Martija, points out "the illiterate Basque learnt many verses of songs and canticles, and even knew Latin canticles from masses and vespers by heart".
Albums like that of Joannes Etcheberri, Kantica izpiritualac (1630), also testify to the practice of ancient para-liturgical music in the vernacular. And in the course of the 20th century, the clergy themselves asserted a desire to construct a liturgy in Basque, of which the cornerstone was singing. Of course, this anthology would be incomplete without lullabies, children’s songs, funeral songs, sea shanties, drinking songs or dance tunes, which have also come down to us and continue, in the case of some of them, to nourish contemporary repertoire.
As for the so-called "political" song (formerly qualified as "historical"), it would assert itself in the 19th century –the period of the emergence of nationalism throughout Europe– with a personality who was to become the greatest "bard" of Basque history, José Maria Iparragirre, the author of the song Gernikako arbola (The Tree of Guernica), considered today as the Basque national anthem. A universalist hymn, this text evokes as a symbol of liberty the oak of Gernika beneath which kings, since the Middle Ages, would swear to respect popular liberties. After Iparragirre, political song was to be a special flower, blossoming in protest to tragedies and dramatic events of the 20th century.
