Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra
Violeta se fue a los cielos
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was born in 1917, into a musical family in Chile’s Valle Central. She was the third of eight siblings, among them Nicanor Parra, the university physicist, national poet, winner of Chile’s Premio Nacional de Literatura y Miguel de Cervantes, and her lifelong confidant.
From early on, Parra learned and sang boleros, Peruvian valses, Mexican corridos, and Chilean cuecas. She sought the mentorship of traditional artists, developing a singular voice that in time would gain international recognition. Her reception in Paris was both musical and artistic as a painter and textile artist (she exhibited in The Louvre).
She became the doyen of a folk performance center she founded outside Santiago de Chile. Parra’s life entailed a wide-ranging struggle against the poverty, paternalism, and sharp class distinctions of Chilean society, and the contradictory passions and sadness of her family and love relationships.
Originally issued by RCA in 1966, Las últimas composiciones de Violeta Parra is a remastered, vinyl-only release of her final and arguably most famous recording. Despite her considerable achievements, she expressed deep disappointment that her artistic mission did not garner the material support she believed it warranted both at home and abroad.
Shortly after this title’s original issue, Parra took her own life in February 1967. Broader recognition would come thereafter, especially as her spirit animated the Nueva Canción (New Song) movement of Allende years (1970–1973), and carried over into resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) and beyond.
The biopic Violeta Went to Heaven (Violeta se fue a los cielos, 2011), based on the biography by her son, Ángel Parra, a folk singer like his mother, portrays her as an artistic iconoclast. In what may be read as her creative manifesto, she declared, “Write as you like, use the rhythms that come out, try different instruments, sit at the piano, destroy the metric, shout instead of singing, blow your guitar and ring the horn. Hate mathematics and love eddies. Creation is a bird without a flight plan that will never fly in a straight line.”
This title presents Parra’s final works, including “Run Run se fue pa’l norte” (a bittersweet reflection on her lover’s departure to take up with a younger woman in Bolivia), and “Maldigo del alto cielo”:
I curse the statues
Of time with its shame
How much pain will be mine?
I curse the perfumed
Because my longing is dead
I curse the vocabulary of love
With all its sorcery
How much pain will be mine?
Because of a betrayer
How much pain will be mine?
“Rin del angelito” (Angel’s Rhyme) reads as a lamentation on the early death of her daughter Rosita Clara:
When one dies in the flesh
The soul goes straight
To greet the moon
And on the way a little star.
Included as well is Parra’s best-known song, “Gracias a la vida” (Thanks to Life), made famous by Mercedes Sosa and Joan Baez, later covered by Yo-Yo Ma, Omara Portuondo, and Shakira among many others. Often interpreted as a lyrical suicide note, as Parra told Chilean author Sabine Drysdale, “I had nothing. I gave everything. I wanted to give, but I found no one who would receive what I had to give.”
In Parra’s last letter to her brother Nicanor she wrote, “I do not take my own life for love. I do it out of the pride that washes away the mediocre.” Parra was unyielding until the end, in a testament and consecration of her own choosing.
Thanks to life, which has given me so much
It has given me sound, and the alphabet
And the words with which I think and declare
Mother, friend, brother, and shining light
The route of the soul through which I love.