Francisco Nieva

Francisco Morales Nieva (Valdepeñas, Ciudad Real, December 29, 1927-Madrid, November 10, 2016) was a Spanish playwright, set designer, stage director, narrator, essayist and cartoonist..

Academic of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1990, where he held the J chair, his theatrical production earned him the National Theater Award on two occasions (1980 and 1992), the National Literature Award in the category of Dramatic Literature and the Valle-Inclán Award (2011), for writing and directing Tórtolas, crepúsculo y... telón. For his literary production in general, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 1992.

Biography

Francisco Nieva himself wrote a volume of memoirs entitled Things as they were (2002). His family was descended from wealthy conversos who emigrated to Spain in the 17th century and he was the great-grandson of the Hellenist and priest Ciriaco Cruz. His father, Francisco Morales, an official from the Valdepeñas City Council, was civil governor of Toledo with the Republic in 1931, and they lived there until the war broke out in 1936. An uncle, Cirilo del Río, was also a minister during the years of the Republic and his paternal grandfather was President of the Provincial Council for many years.

His parents loved culture and art and took their children to the theater, the movies and the zarzuela. The maternal grandfather was fond of opera and reading and the grandmother played the piano with great skill. Francisco's brother, Ignacio, became a noted composer; As for him, he was attracted to art very early, especially theater, and entertained himself with stage sets, puppets, and cardboard dolls. The Civil War caught them in Valdepeñas and during 1939 they lived in isolation in a house in Sierra Morena, in the Venta de Cárdenas district; Back in his native place, he received private lessons from Juan Alcaide, a poet related to "Postism" and a friend of Carlos Edmundo de Ory, and with him he reads classic and modern Spanish and European works (La Celestina, José Gutiérrez Solana, Alfred Jarry). His family decided to emigrate to Madrid in 1945, where Nieva studied painting at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts and became a friend of Eduardo Chicharro Briones y Ory, leaders "postistas", trying to break through as a plastic artist. Within that post-war avant-garde movement, which had other La Mancha representatives such as Ángel Crespo in its ranks. While his composer brother became an evangelical pastor and emigrated to the United States and Puerto Rico, he lived in Paris between 1953 and 1963, where he attended the premiere of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, enjoying a scholarship awarded in 1953 by Dr. Piterbag, an Argentine Jew from the French Institute in Paris, and there he worked as a painter and draughtsman, in the midst of a highly bohemian environment. In the environment of the late Antonin Artaud, he sketches his work The Combat of Opals and Tasia and receives the Polignac prize for his entire artistic work (1963). In Paris, he married Geneviève Escande, who holds a high position at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, through the Protestant rite, he met the publisher of the surrealists José Corti and he alternated with well-known French Hispanists, publishing pioneering studies on the influence of Miguel de Cervantes in the theater of García Lorca and the plastic in the work of Valle-Inclán. After living in Venice for a year, he returned to Madrid in 1964 and, except for long stays in Berlin and Rome, he remained based in this city, dedicated to his I work as a set designer, playwright and contributor to various periodicals.

As a set designer, his work began with José Luis Alonso Mañés, with whom he collaborated creating the scenes for The King is Dying by Ionesco for the María Guerrero theater. He later worked with Adolfo Marsillach on the set designs for Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw and After the Fall by Arthur Miller. These works made him a reference figure in his field, and throughout the sixties he worked on La dama duende by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The satin shoe by Paul Claudel, El burlador de Sevilla by Tirso de Molina, El señor Adrián by Carlos Arniches and, of course, Marat-Sade by Peter Weiss, again under the direction of Adolfo Marsillach and Antonio Malonda.

However, he remained unpublished as a playwright until he published in First Act and privately staged It's Good to Have No Head in 1971. His theatrical ideas were expressed in the text known as Brief theatrical poetics around the concepts of "transgression", "countervalue" and "guilt"; It intends to stage what is prohibited as if it were the most bland, conventional and current in the public sphere ("countervalue") in search of a total liberation (catharsis). This poetics drinks fundamentally from the Artaud that he met in Paris, but also from Alfred Jarry, Ghelderode, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet; Nieva's originality is to consciously insert this avant-garde into the Spanish literary tradition of the grotesque and the grotesque, granting the comic a fundamental role in achieving this inversion, continuing the tradition of Cervantes, Quevedo, José Gutiérrez Solana and Valle-Inclán.

Although he initially classified his theater as "Furious Theater", "Theater of Farce and Calamity" and "Teatro de crónica y estampa", the publication of his Teatro completo in 1991 made him distinguish other groups:

• Initial theatre: Toys, twilight and curtain, composed in 1953 in Paris but continuously retouched until it was published in 1972 and later retouched until its 1989 version; It's good not to have a head, written in 1967 during a stay in Dublin. The wonderful Fall of Lord Bashaville, composed in Vienna in 1967.
• Operators: Storm pitwritten in Paris in 1961 and Nosferatu (Aquelarre and red night)written in 1961, published in 1975 and represented in 1993.
• Furious theatre: The candent lead chariot, written in Rome in 1969 and premiered in 1976. The Fight of Opals and Tasia, written between 1953 and 1964, and premiered in 1976.
• Theatre of farce and calamity: Mrs. Tártarawritten in 1969 and represented in 1980, and The dance of the fieryreleased in 1990. Also included Crown and bull(1973) and The Spanish underground (1975).
• Theater of chronicle and print: Larra Shadow and Chimera, very personal version of No more counter by Mariano José de Larra.
• Theatre in shortfall key: The insatiable spectrum (1968), It's not true. (1987)), Carlota Balsifinder (1987), Travel forms youth (1992)...

This classification was modified in the edition of his Complete Works (2007), where he distinguishes six groups: Centón de teatro, Teatro Furioso, Theatre of Farce and Calamity, Theater of Chronicles and Stamps, Three free versions and Varia theatrical.

To all these works we must add their adaptations of classics; Apart from the aforementioned Larra, there are La Paz by Aristophanes, The Baths of Algiers by Cervantes, Casandra by Galdós, Las Adventures of Tirant el Blanco by Joanot Martorell, The Manuscript Found in Zaragoza by Jan Potocki, Divine Words by Valle-Inclán adapted to opera with music by Antón García-Abril, Don Álvaro or the Force of Fate, by the Duke of Rivas, Disdain with Disdain, by Agustín Moreto and Electra, by Benito Perez Galdos.

As a stage director he staged operas, zarzuelas and ballets such as Cinderella by Sergei Prokofiev, Capricho español by Enrique Granados, La vida breve by Manuel de Falla, L'heure espagnole by Maurice Ravel, Pepita Jiménez by Isaac Albéniz, Tosca by Giacomo Puccini, Curro Vargas by Ruperto Chapí, I due Foscari by Giuseppe Verdi, Don Giovanni by Mozart and La Senorita Cristina by Luis de Pablo.

His last aspect was that of a novelist: he wrote The trip to Pantaelica (1994), The llama dressed in black (1995), Granada de las mil nights (1995), Oceánida (1996), Bat Meat. Tale of Madrid (1998)...

A regular contributor to the Madrid newspaper La Razón, in 1990 he entered the Royal Spanish Academy with a speech entitled Essence and paradigm of the small genre.

Work

He had already written theater since 1949, but he only began to premiere and publish it from 1971.

The dramatic work of Francisco Nieva can be divided into two large groups, called by the author "Furious Theatre" and "Theater of Farce and Calamity". A more imaginative and vitalist model than the popular theater developed in the Spanish postwar period, with a 'valleinclanesco' language and a baroque set design.

His narrative work is an extension of that particular universe, with examples such as The trip to Pantaelica, Oceánida and The llama dressed in black: mystery novel and awe (1995), a kind of narrative cycle starring the Galician gentleman Cambicio de Santiago, which continues with Granada de las mil noches and La mutación del primo mentiroso (I Duchy of Loeches Novel Prize in 2004).

Although there was already an edition of his Complete Theater from 1991 in two volumes, the Complete Works published in 2007 modifies the texts quite a bit, compiling in two volumes of about 2500 pages each his entire production. The first is dedicated to his Theater and the second includes the entire Narrative and a selection of articles.

Awards

• Polignac Award (1963)
• National costume award (1970) by the figurines The Marquesa Rosalinda from Valle-Inclán.
• National Scenography Award (1972)
• Madrid Press Association Award (1973)
• Mayte Theatre Award (1976)
• Premio Álvarez Quintero de teatro de la Real Academia Española
• National Theatre Award on two occasions (1980 and 1992)
• Critics Prize (1982)
• Elected member of the Spanish Royal Academy (1986)
• Mariano Award for Cavia (1991)
• National Literature Award for Dramatic Literature (1992)
• Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (1992).
• Gold Medal of the Community of Castilla-La Mancha (1993)
• Gold Medal to merit in Fine Arts (1996)
• Segismundo Award of the Association of Directors of Spain (1999)
• Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Castilla-La Mancha (2001)
• First Ducado de Loeches Award for his novel The mutation of the lying cousin
• Community Theatre Award (2007)
• Alcalá City Award for Arts and Letters (2008)
• Corral de Comedias Award of the Almagro Festival (2010)
• Valle-Inclán Award (2011) by Tortolas, twilight and... curtain.
• XIV Max Award (2011)
• Honorary member of the Academy of the performing arts of Spain since 2014.

Bibliography

• Javier Huerta, Emilio Peral, Héctor Urzaiz, A to Z Spanish Theatre. Madrid: Espasa, 2005.