The Fish, the Angel, and the Price of Sacrifice: Blasco Ibáñez and Sorolla

Years ago, standing in a Boston cemetery on a rainy day while filming my documentary on Daniel Chester French, I learned that the composer George Whitefield Chadwick had written a symphony inspired by a sculpture. The sculpture was French's Milmore Memorial — The Angel of Death Staying the Hand of the Young Sculptor — rising over the grave at Forest Hills; the music was Chadwick's symphonic poem The Angel of Death, completed in 1918 and premiered the following year at a memorial concert for Theodore Roosevelt. I put the story in the film. And I remember thinking, in the rain, about what kind of translation that is.

When a composer is inspired by a tune, he works on variations, and we might recognize the kinship. When a painter, a sculptor, or an architect finds inspiration in another's work, the debt shows — in shape, in color, in gesture. The wings on a funerary angel standing over the grave of a lost child; the long brushstrokes on a canvas born of admiration felt at an exhibition; the arches of a modern building remembering the medieval cathedrals of France. It is the same language talking in a different poetic variation. Writers, too, paraphrase one another, frequent the same themes and plots; the dialogue runs across timelines. But what Chadwick did with French crosses a wider gulf. The translation from bronze to music does not work on our sensibility unaided — we need the composer's confession to place the two works side by side. Without it, no ear would find the angel in the orchestra.

It does not always need to be like that.

Take a page from Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. At the close of Flor de mayo (1895), the sea has taken the fishing boat and returned the body of the cabin boy to the beach of the Cabañal. Over the drowned child, the old fishwife Tía Picores turns toward the city — toward the customers who haggle at the fish stalls — and hurls her fury: let them come and see this. Does the fish still seem expensive to them? The argument is made in a single cry: the buyer complains of the price while ignoring the sacrifice that brings the catch from the sea.

Now stand in the Prado before Joaquín Sorolla's ¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro! — "And they still say fish is expensive!" In the dim hold of a barge, two weathered sailors tend a young crewman, wounded at sea, a medallion of the Virgin on his pale chest. The painting took its very title from his friend's novel; the derivation is documented, and the two works appeared within months of each other. Here no confession is required. The page and the canvas recognize each other on sight.

Joaquín Sorolla's ¡Aún dicen que el pescado es caro!

Illustrators have done this for ages — from the illuminated margins of medieval manuscripts to the modern design of book covers — and the set decorators of theatre and opera have always built rooms out of paragraphs. But between Blasco Ibáñez and Sorolla there is something different, something that goes beyond illustration. It comes from mutual admiration between two sons of Valencia, born four years apart in the same city, formed by the same world of fishermen, sailors, and markets. In time they would even share a beach: Blasco built his chalet on the Malvarrosa, and Sorolla painted on that same sand, a guest at his friend's table. In 1906 Sorolla painted Blasco's portrait — a canvas that hangs today, fittingly, at the Hispanic Society in New York, where the friendship itself emigrated.

And it comes from a shared social sensibility: a common cause with the fisherman who risks his life and is never compensated according to his effort. That sensibility belongs to the Spain of the turn of the century — a country in which one Spain was licking its wounds while another was beginning to look into the future, into the need for change. The novelist wrote the cry; the painter made it visible; and between them, without needing anyone's confession, they left us the truest picture we have of the price of fish.