50 years since Aute's 'Al Alba': how the legendary song came to be (and it wasn't because of Franco's executions)

"If I told you, my love, that I fear the dawn, I don't know what stars these are that hurt like threats, nor do I know what the moon bleeds.

at the edge of his scythe.

I have a feeling that after the night will come the longest night

I want you not to abandon me

my love, at dawn, at dawn, at dawn

at dawn, at dawn"

On November 20, 1975, dictator Francisco Franco died. He did so not before taking a final mass rally in the Plaza de Oriente on October 1. " Informe general ," the documentary by Pere Portabella , is a magnificent document of that era, of the social movements and tensions of the transition that was already underway.

That year, Aute appeared on the TVE program Voces a 45, performing Anda and Cuando duermes . The singer introduced himself with these words: "I'm Luis Eduardo Aute. I write songs because I like doing it and also because I believe that songs are a very important vehicle for communicating ideas." He still appears stoic on stage. In the playback of Cuando duermes, the camera follows him as he walks, and there is a close-up of his feet and bell-bottoms. The singer wears a short-sleeved shirt and has long hair. These returns to TVE are preambles to his future decision to sing live.

In April of that same year, the writer Andrés Sorel published his book "Castilla como agonía" (Castilla as Agony), which was scheduled to be presented at the Galería Tambor, but was banned by the police. Later, in September, the last of Franco's death row inmates were executed. Sorel was arrested along with Brigitte Heinrich at the Portuguese border and his passport confiscated. The song "Al alba" (Dawn) would later portray the claustrophobic atmosphere of the dying Franco regime in its verses. In his memoirs, the communist militant recalls some lines of solidarity sent to him by Luis Eduardo Aute, a clear example of his anti-fascist commitment:

Thank you, Andrés, truly, for the information about your book. I hope and pray that if the publisher were to try to burn it in the summer, it would survive the burning, achieving the holy success of Joan of Arc . As you know, no war is in vain, for that which is bestowed upon him who plays with fire... A big hug.

Sorel's case reveals Aute's commitment to his friends, offering them his support and solidarity. As the end of Franco's regime continued to batter him, Aute wrote "Al alba" ( Dawn), a shock, a lament. Part of the legend of this song was reinforced by the fact that it transcended its own objectives and placed itself in a mythical territory of the struggle for freedom and justice . Aute made this clear to me in one of the interviews we held at his home:

The song was linked to the executions, but it came about before. It's a love song. I wanted to write a song about them, but it just didn't work for me. I didn't want to do something pamphleteering, and I abandoned the idea. Then I started writing other love songs and "Al alba" (Dawn) came about, which had no political intention. Unintentionally, the song's narration evokes someone who was about to be executed at dawn. When Rosa León heard it for the first time, she told me the song seemed to be about an execution, but I denied it. Rosa recorded it before it happened. Upon learning of the death sentence against those accused, she had the nerve to dedicate the song to them in her concerts. That's why it became linked to the executions. It's Rosa León who links it to those events.

"When Rosa León heard it, she told me the song seemed to be about a shooting, but I denied it. It's a love song."

Aute himself had already sung it in the studios of Radio Nacional de España before that happened, just in case there were any doubts. Important in this whole story of Al alba is the way Rosa León made the song her own , placing it in the context of those final executions of the Franco regime that took place on September 27, 1975, in Madrid, Barcelona, ​​and Burgos. That day , three FRAP (Revolutionary Anti-Fascist and Patriotic Front) militants and two from the political-military wing of ETA were executed. These executions triggered a chain reaction against the Franco regime, which died killing. The death penalty would not be abolished until 1978 by Article 15 of the new Constitution. That same year, Aute recorded his legendary song, filled with images charged with unease, such as those unborn children hidden in the sewers, the silent vultures spreading their wings , the moon bleeding from the scythe, or the stars that wound like threats. The night, the darkness, in short, as the gallows and final metaphor for Francoism.

Al alba is a song about death, as will be the album Sarcófago , recorded in 1976 and produced by José Manuel Caballero Bonald , and entrusted to the emblematic verse of Gil de Biedma: "Growing old, dying, is the only argument of the work." Another of the quotes that appear on the album takes us to May 2012 in France, to the streets of Paris, to the student revolt, to the voices and echoes of Nanterre and to an anonymous graffiti that said: Crier la mort, c'est crier la vie ( To shout death is to shout life ). The third and final quote is from Woody Allen , the New York filmmaker who said he only believed in sex and death, two basic elements in Aute's songbook that will thematically structure Espuma and Sarcófago . Through the quotes that he strategically places in his poems and on his albums, it is possible to trace his influences, the poets he reads in private, those he pays homage to and in whom he looks.

These executions sparked a backlash against the Franco regime, which was killing itself. The death penalty was not abolished until 1978.

These seventies are also defined by the poetry that Aute essays and develops in La matemático del espejo, in which he writes: "It would be false to avoid the inexplicable splinter, the venous sting / caused by the unquoted word / the involuntary and purifying spill / retained for too long / by the mathematics of the mirror / and the shame that always tarnishes / that instant barely transparent." The collection of poems is dated between 1970 and 1975, at the same time that Aute crafts the trilogy of love and death formed by Rito , Espuma and Sarcófago . La matemático del espejo includes poems that would later become songs in Sarcófago . It will not be easy to make the free verse that supports that collection of poems full of daring, images and visions singable.

Aute's poetry is part of his lyrical period and breaks with the social poetry of previous decades. José Manuel Caballero Bonald blesses this attempt with his prologue:

With a verbal structure that does not hide some debt to surrealism and that sometimes leans, as a deliberate dialectical contrast, towards colloquial forms, Aute has moved almost seamlessly from the cultivation of an intimate lyric to an epic of extroverted subterfuge, between whose tentacles struggle some of the most abrupt and typified signs of a society atrophied by its own stupidity or its own vileness.

Caballero Bonald becomes not only the person who spurs him to return to a recording studio, but also the best exegete of the fledgling poet. He analyzes his elegiac and ironic tone, which is also characteristic of his painting, and delves into the nature of his sententious verse, which is not lacking in satire or humor. It could also be said that in The Mathematics of the Mirror, beyond its hermeticism, there is already something of the future author of the lightning-fast "poemigas."

Fourteen poems from The Mathematics of the Mirror will be part of the album Sarcófago , which Aute recorded in 1976. Among them, Una ladilla , which opened the collection and which can serve as a perfect example to understand the meaning of Aute's poetry, his cinephilia, his way of portraying himself through a collage full of mythomaniac and even advertising references and in which the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma , the myth of Marilyn Monroe , Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch , the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, the image of Gary Cooper in Man of the West or Barbara Steele in the Parisian Mac Mahon room, also cited in Cine, cine , coexist . The poem, which works by accumulation, ends with the allusion to the pubis on the big screen that could be seen in the German documentary Helga, the miracle of a life , dated 1967: "In Spain a pubis / on the big screen, Helga / I am a poet, he says / I am a poet, he insists / although I am a poet."

Aute is in his thirties. He smokes compulsively. He creates compulsively . At dawn he is born from that dark and murky context of late Francoism. In a piece close to haiku titled Efemérides he writes: "Dilated niche / called / world." Years later, he will write a song titled Ugly Filthy World . The mathematics of the mirror responds with irrationality and dreamlikeness to a sometimes unbearable world. Poem titles such as Tímidos suicidas en ayunas ( Timid Suicides on an Empty Stomach), El terror que causas las uñas (The Terror Produced by Nails) , De un tiempo a esta parte (From Time to This Part ), El dolor llena (The Fulfilled Pain) , or Un sarcophagus Full of Stumps (A Sarcophagus Full of Stumps ) can be a guide in this regard.

Among the poems from La Matemática del Espejo that Aute will record in Sarcófago , the claustrophobic sensuality of El Elevador stands out for being a poem and song rescued by the Filipino singer-songwriter in his celebrated live album Entre Amigos , a resonant example of the most pop Aute who toured in the bright eighties with Luis Mendo , key in his musical evolution.

Analyzing The Mathematics of the Mirror is a compelling and fascinating exercise that cannot be separated from the very evolution of contemporary Spanish poetry and Aute's creative moment, capable of offering the most daring albums of his career in these years. Our protagonist belongs to the generation of '68, which others call the Poets of '70, and who comes to question the previous generation, practitioners of a social poetry largely alien to formal issues. Despite this, the generation of '50 is not lacking in highly relevant poets, such as Claudio Rodríguez , Jaime Gil de Biedma or José Manuel Caballero Bonald , who do not respond to the parameters of social poetry.

Among the singer-songwriters of his generation, Aute was the most complex in his way of fusing song with poem and vice versa. In his writing, it was easy to find some surrealist echoes, but also a fondness for colloquial forms and an intimate lyricism that nonetheless knew how to rise and denounce a time of insults, injustices, and vileness. Aute's open baggage might equally carry a poem by Paul Éluard or a rebellious echo of the ideology of the People's Song movement. His affinity with the heterodox and the avant-garde was present in his written and sung poetry, and was part of that lacerating reality noted in a notebook and of daily life, that mirror into which man and his guitar turn from time to time to look in order to define his own crossroads.

Caballero Bonald highlighted Aute's capacity for satire, already evident in some of his songs from Rito . Faced with an unjust society, the singer responds with the lyrical weapons at his disposal, forging a diverse poetics in which irony coexists with elegy, sarcasm with eroticism, and cultured thought with directly popular forms. During these years, Aute conceived a curious lyrical self-portrait that is also a collective portrait of an incomprehensible world that, feeling its reason numbed, produces monsters of flesh and blood. Humor and that lyrical way of looking at love, at the intimate, played an important role in this construction, forging a sentimental poetry that shuns hermeticism to find a highly receptive audience . The best Aute is present in that trilogy formed by Rito , Espuma and Sarcófago , and also in the poems of La Matemática del Espejo , whose creative process is parallel to that of the songs on those albums.

Sarcófago was recorded in 1976 and is one of Aute's most daring, groundbreaking, and unclassifiable works. The record company told him: "Record Babel and we'll let you make Sarcófago ." From the satirical songs that were successful to the death songs that four listened to, despite the swing and bossa nova with which Aute tried to spice them up.

"Death is a place," wrote Carlos Edmundo de Ory on one of his meteorites. The cover of Sarcófago is already a statement of intent with its painting of a maternity ward with a fetus numbered in its various parts. The album's failure was expected given its status as a minority work, twilight and elegiac. Within Aute's body of work, Sarcófago stands as a cult work that stands as the antithesis of Babel , recorded a year earlier.

The cover of Sarcófago is already a declaration of intent.

Aute selects fourteen poems from The Mathematics of the Mirror and integrates them into Sarcófago without regard for commercial concessions. The world that unfolds in the collection belongs to a poet who has reached his thirties and reveals the forms of his maturity, the fruit of the experience and turmoil of an intense period, the late Franco era, from which would emerge a gem like Al alba , a transitional hymn much more eloquent, graphic and explosive than Jarcha's leaden and conciliatory Libertad sin ira . In Al alba there is an underground cry very similar to that in Munch 's painting , to which Aute dedicates the second of the poems in The Mathematics of the Mirror and which functions as a short song, a device for conciseness, or a lyrical flash, a constant in his work, which also contains longer poems.

The dreamlike and the irrational are part of the poetics of Sarcófago . Tímidos suicidas en ayunas —a title that is more than definitive—is opened by a verse from Leonard Cohen 's collection of poems Flores para Hitler , which is not quoted on the album. Aute is drawn to Cohen's universe, but he also likes to distance himself from him, although José Ramón Pardo emphasized the parallels between their respective works in 1978. Aute acknowledged that, like the Canadian genius, he felt more like a poet than a musician. This love of words, aestheticism, and liturgical meaning brought them together, although there were differences in the way they penetrated the religious, as Aute perceived: "He is concerned with religious themes at the level of content. In my case, it is more at the level of aesthetics, of ceremony. I am interested in the sacred as a form contrary to the demonic ." We will also find this vision in the singer-songwriter's painting and poetry.

'Al alba' is a much more eloquent, graphic and explosive transitional hymn than Jarcha's leaden and conciliatory 'Libertad sin ira'

Returning to Sarcófago , Tímidos suicidas en ayunas occupies third place in the poetic organization of La matemático del espejo , but it is the one Aute chooses to open the album. Following the order Aute establishes in Sarcófago , El terror que producen las uñas appears as the third poem-song on the album and differs from its location in the book, just before the poem that gives the book its name. Aute writes about the terror produced by nails when they dig into the air . The poet shines in his exercise of metaphor and his feverish use of adjectives, as when he sings about "pupil machine-gunned." The final stanza focuses on stupidity, "which has a dangerous capacity / to take itself seriously." In the fifth installment of his "poemigas," he will sign a poem titled De todo hay (There is Everything) and headed by the following quote from Einstein : "There are two infinite things: the Universe and human stupidity."

The songs on Sarcófago require multiple listens to fully comprehend . They are not part of Aute's more accessible songbook that has managed to enter popular memory. Sarcófago embraces its status as a minority work whose cryptic, aestheticist language eschews mainstream consumption. What's surprising is that Aute—at the height of his creative freedom—was able to create an album of these characteristics in 1976, when he was moving toward openness and leaving behind the relentless moral constraints of the defunct Franco regime . Aute focuses his mysterious gaze on everyday objects, accumulates strongly expressionist images, and doesn't forget to incorporate unmistakable signs of dark humor into his songs, as well as his poems. In De un tiempo a esta parte , the fourth track on the album, he delivers verses that should be whispered more than sung, suggested more than explicit.

The mathematics of the mirror hosts several quotes and winks that explain by themselves the inalienable universe of Aute. There will be explicit tributes, such as the one dedicated to the painter Antonio Saura in the poem The painting of Antonio Saura , which will also be dressed as an obtuse and melancholic song in Sarcófago . Following the scheme of short songs, Aute will need a single stanza of four lines to outline a thought, as revealed in Todo va bien . El dolor cumple (The fulfilled pain ) links with the cover of Sarcófago and is another poem-song—the one that closes side A of the album—that follows the maxim of brevity and is an etching of motherhood , a journey to the origin, to birth, to human conception from the pain of the female womb from which life itself comes.

Life passes quickly, and there's barely room for moments of calm, of luminous stillness like a low tide to embrace at first light. Sarcófago is an existentialist album created by someone singing to their own uncertainty, and it moves through the generational portrait and pictorial collage of Una ladilla (A Paddling Pub) to then surrender to the traces of disorder, fear, and the emptiness provoked by anguish in Una vez más (Once Again ), which opens the album's B-side.

It will be a creative experience to immerse yourself in these original texts, to sing what at first seems not to lend itself to being sung, this baggage of free verse lost in a valley of tears where there is even room to represent a bathtub full of blood in which the revolutionary Marat appears, whose lifeless face would be transformed into a memorable painting by Jacques-Louis David . In the song "A Sarcophagus Full of Stumps," Marat shares the scene with the actress Jayne Mansfield , another myth who ended in disgrace—like Marilyn —after taking life's blows badly and finding herself at death's door before her time. Aute's gothic dreaminess imagines a levitating sarcophagus and a stuffed bird descending into the night. The final verses culminate with a certain irony this new oddity in Aute's darkest and most intricate repertoire of the seventies: "My head hurts like a civil war / and that couple of aspirins / Bayer / that you offer me with such good will do me no good."

Sarcophagus finally arrives at The Mathematics of the Mirror . The eight verses of this poem condense the poetics of a hermetic book that seems to draw the carnivorous signs of a dark time.

Carlos Montero is responsible for the album's arrangements, as he had done on Aute's other albums during those years. There is an evident musical connection between this album and the previous ones ( Rito and Espuma ), which complete this trilogy of love and death. The instrumentation enhances Aute's lyrical discourse. Pedro Iturralde is a familiar presence on many albums of the period and appears in the credits playing the saxophone. The flutes of José Oliver , Vicente Martínez , and José Domínguez are also prominent. The piano is another instrument that lends musical nuances to the difficult poems that structure the album. The trio of instrumentalists Manuel Borriño, Agustín Serrano, and Benjamín Torrijo are involved in this task. The guitars heard on Sarcófago are those of Carlos Montero and Fernando López Gómez . The musical relationship is completed by Tito Duarte 's drums and Eduardo Medina's double bass.

It is an album from 1976, which was moving towards openness and leaving behind the relentless moral restrictions of the defunct regime.

Of all Sarcófago 's repertoire , El ascensor is perhaps the least secret piece on the album, since Aute revived it in his live album Entre amigos , which marks an important creative stage in his own career at a time of plenitude in which he is positioned as a clear reference for the singer-songwriter style that was then emerging on the Spanish music scene. El ascensor is a pure erotic and claustrophobic game, with the use of anything but subliminal advertising. Aute imagines a man and a woman trapped in an elevator, with no possibility of escape, wrapped in a desperate and hysterical embrace that ends up driving them to the shameless regions of desire as a way of also awaiting death, of opposing it with the fierce certainty of sex. Aute weaves a curious story by establishing two musical tempos in an exercise similar to the one he practiced in Una ladilla and which acts as a counterpoint and diversion in the very development of an album as inaccessible as Sarcófago .

* AUTE infinite , by Luis García Gil (Alianza), explores the many facets of this singular artist through a rigorous and personal account, written from the intimacy and knowledge of the subject. Richly illustrated, with a selection of commented videos and a Spotify playlist curated by the author, this biography offers a comprehensive look at the music, creativity, and life of Luis Eduardo Aute. It will be published on May 15th.

* Luis García Gil (Cádiz, 1974) is a versatile author whose work combines film, popular song, and poetry. As a song specialist, his bibliography is extensive. He is the author of biographies on Marisol, Raphael, Jacques Brel, and Atahualpa Yupanqui, among others.