Description
Another meeting place for Machado was the old Artisans Casino, now gone.This casino witnessed some of the most unique episodes of Machado's time in Baeza and it is here where, on an evening, he met a young Federico García Lorca who was still more of a musician than a writer. One of these episodes occurred as soon as he arrived in this city and went to present himself to the director of the institute at his home. Upon arrival, they told him that he was in “agony” and Machado responded: “how sorry I am”; until they clarify that they were referring to the Artisans Casino. They called the casino “the agony,” because its members, almost all farmers, spent their time predicting ruins due to the poor state of the crops and the lack of rain. The second episode, artistically of greater significance, occurs when he meets at the Casino de los Artesanos with a young Federico García Lorca, even more of a musician than a writer. The poet from Granada visited Baeza in both 1916 and 1917 as a member of the group of students at the University of Granada led by the professor of Theory of Literature and the Arts, Domínguez Berrueta. An evening took place in one of its rooms in which Antonio Machado recited verses by Rubén Darío and fragments of La Tierra by Alvargonzález for the travelers, while the young student Federico García Lorca played Andalusian pieces such as the Danza de la Vida Breve by Falla on the piano. The Land of Alvargonzález. Antonio Machado The Assassins I (…) They were approaching the fountain. The clear water ran, sounding as if it counted an old story, told a thousand times and that he had a thousand times to repeat it. (…) Furthermore, it is undoubtedly one of the places with the greatest literary impact on Lorca's life. Here his meeting occurs, when he is still more of a musician than a writer, with Machado. This fact will mark his artistic orientation towards letters and will make him one of the most universal poets of our literature. On June 8, 1916, the evening took place in which Machado recited for the travelers verses by Rubén Darío - who had died months before - and fragments of La Tierra by Alvargonzález, while Lorca played Andalusian pieces such as the Danza de la Vida Breve by Falla on the piano. In this recital he meets María del Reposo Urquía, who also performs some pieces. Antonio Chicharro, in the collaboration he makes in the book tribute to the centenary of Machado's arrival in Baeza One Hundred Years of the Meeting of Antonio Machado and Baeza or the Celebration of a Poetry as an Essential Word in Time, tells us that this meeting also marked the beginning of a respectful friendship between Antonio Machado and the young García Lorca, underlined in a poem signed in 1918 by the young Granada student in the first pages of a book borrowed from the first edition of Complete Poems by Antonio Machado: I would leave in this book all my soul This book you have seen with me the landscapes and lived holy hours. The echoes of this meeting were also going to materialize in the first poem he wrote, according to his brother Francisco García Lorca, dated June 1917: Canción. Dream and Confusion, absolutely Rubenian in style. Song Dream and Confusion (…) And the blackish and silent night arrives and the flesh arrives with faith and splendor and pleasure comes with the sweet loss. More oh! that death came and the pain. (…)
