“De la dulce mi enemiga” Ecos y contextos de una referencia musical en la obra cervantina

Abstract

There cannot be any doubt that Cervantes’s works reflect faithfully the Spanish musical world of XVIth and XVIIth centuries: musical instruments, dances and bailes, romances and songs are often cited and performed in his pages in order to depict not only a special and picturesque environment in which his characters evolve –such as a gypsy’s world in La gitanilla or Muslim’s traditions in La gran sultana or Los baños de Argel–, but in addition assign a particular semantic value to each musical element adding a supplementary meaning to the work’s understanding. In this paper we’ll analyze the musical topic “De la dulce mi enemiga”, a well-known song for the readers of Cervantes’ time, and we’ll present its different musical settings in order to study how this topic cited in his works was understood as implicit and intertextual musical reference that, once recognized, it would be able to add to the text a particular meaning.