España de la guerra

This book describes for the first time the political songs that were sung in Spain against King Joseph Bonaparte during the war known in the UK as the Peninsular War or in Spain as the Guerra de la Independencia. These songs have never been described before, no doubt because most of their surviving musical scores are now outside Spain, in London, Lisbon, and elsewhere. You will not find these songs in the standard histories of this period. I find this exciting. The book has a catalogue of about 160 of these songs. I take a view of the politics of the time different from the view normally current today and basing itself solely on documents of the time, not on later victors’ rewriting of history. These political songs of the time were one of the most powerful aspects of the propaganda of the time because in these songs, the recipients of the propaganda not merely heard the message but participated in it by actually themselves singing the message of the propaganda. The principal composer of these songs of the war was Fernando Sor, who has six known songs of this kind to his credit, all of them discussed in this book. You will find the book interesting and with new information if you are interested in the Peninsular War, or the Guerra de la Independencia, or Fernando Sor, or the nature of propaganda, or indeed the whole political and propagandistic state of Spain at that time.