The following texts writen by Antonio Bayona were included in this webpage on occasion of the centenary of Luis Buñuel birth, in the year 2000. Now, we have put them here as further information about the film director.

 They are seven informal sketches about Buñuel and some other people going through this web, always with the common background: Pilar Bayona
 

 

Conchita Mantecón

Pianos

Networks 

Alfonso

Snapshot in Calanda

Both Luises

My debt

 

     
Conchita Mantecón        


Concha de la Torre and Pilar Bayona were cousins. Concha tells Max Aub that she was not old enough to be admitted in the musical parties celebrated in Bayona’s home, that Luis Buñuel and other young people attended  (It is also known that the mathematics classes given by Mr. Bayona to these young boys were at time inevitably interrupted by the piano music played in another room, when the emotion of the piece was stronger than the science being taught at that moment).
Also Concha says that Luis Buñuel went to her mother’s home in Madrid to visit Pilar, during her stay in this town to offer a series of recitals, in 1917. In those meetings, Concha and Luis did not know yet that she was going to get married to José Ignacio Mantecón, one of Luis’ best friends and classmate.
As everybody knows, later on, in Mexico, the two families were in close contact, and Concha became one of Jeanne Roucar’s closest friends.
According to Jeanne’s writings, it was Cotito, Concha’s daughter, who managed to convince Luis to swap Buñuel’s piano for three bottles of champagne. If Jeanne was to be a woman without piano, it is less sad if the piano was to go to somebody related to a pianist.
              

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Pianos

 

Given that the piano is the link to this new comment, I would like to mention that I would have liked to do a serious study about pianos in Buñuel’s work. I always think that in my next revision of Buñuel’s films, I will pay attention to any piano appearing, its use, image, and its probable connotations and symbolism.
In passing, we can remember the very well known pianos with rotten donkeys in An Andalusian Dog, with a very controversial meaning, and the piano in The Exterminating Angel, virtual door (the key was a sonata by Paradisi) to the longed exit for the people locked in.
There is also the piano scene in The Phantom of Liberty. This sequence is too revealing to me. Knowing the fondness of Pilar Bayona for Carnival (Op.9) by Schumann, a piece which appeared repeatedly in her programmes, living it with special joy, knowing also that those years Pilar Bayona was playing Brahms regularly, making known even works that had not been heard in Saragossa, How can I avoid thinking of her when the naked pianist plays Chopin, the most emotive piece in Carnival, or when the male character asks for a piece by Brahms?.
I could not be at peace with myself if I do not add that this intellectual association is mixed with a delighted bewilderment or uneasiness, because as her nephew, godson, and piano student, I have never thought of her "piano nude".
In spite of this, this idea made me ask Buñuel’s sons (in a panel which took place the 26th of April in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid) if they had any data on the subject, or if they remembered any remark made by their father showing that this scene could be a buñuelesque memory/dedication to Pilar Bayona, but although seen as possible, there was not any corroboration of it.
However, and although I know perfectly well that these details don’t tarnish the greatness of Buñuel’s films, as a musician I ask myself: Why didn’t he choose an accurate version of Schumann’s Chopin, instead of the one we can hear in the film? Was it deliberate?

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Networks


In the life of friends, of groups of friends, there are some connections that were surely simple cause/effect in real life, logic conclusions of encounters; but for us, who came later, who did not live those days, seem to be findings, casual hidden bonds knitting the substratum of an era.
So, in the environment of Buñuel, Pilar Bayona goes in 1936 to study piano in the Residencia de Estudiantes probably because Buñuel or Pepín Bello told her about it; Ricardo Urgoiti founds Filmófono, the Production firm that Buñuel directed four films with. Pilar Bayona makes premieres and spreads the music of the Generation of the Republic; These composers -Pittaluga, Rodolfo Halffter and Remacha- put the soundtrack to several Buñuel films; Fermina Atarés -Antonio and Carlos Saura’s mother- speaks about Buñuel with Pilar Bayona; Remacha writes to Pilar Bayona and asks after Buñuel, also he founds the Pamplona Conservatory with the participation (among some others) of Pilar Bayona and Ricardo Urgoiti…. and so we could continue with many others links, in such a way that the underground net of roots of friendship makes emerge the plants and fruits of personal activities.

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Snapshot in Calanda

 


"My dear Pilar: thank you very much for having thought about me, and, what a photographer you are!. I wish I had been able to be with you in Calanda".
                                      
The beginning of a letter from Luis Buñuel to Pilar Bayona. November 1967.

This visit to Calanda was at Easter, to enjoy the famous celebrations of its Holy Week, with the noisy excitement of its drums. After the "rompida" (the moment when all the drummers begin to play) the continuous drumbeat and the mixing of various rhythms and beats becomes a sort of constant buzzing in the brain, that inevitably accompanies any other sensation you enjoy in this Fiesta.
We were at Buñuel’s home, and Conchita treated us very well. They had several cupboards full of pastries and buns at the disposal of all the drummers playing in the Fiesta.
As time went on, the participants came back to the house, exhausted and with their knuckles bleeding, and fell asleep on the bed, sometimes even without taking down the drum.

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Alfonso


" …Luis fell in-love with her (P. Bayona), in a very platonic way, for her music. And the strange thing is that, later, my brother Alfonso, who was sixteen years younger than Luis and also a maths teacher, fell also in-love with Pilar Bayona. I think more so than Luis".
                             
From the interview with Conchita Buñuel in Conversations with Buñuel by Max Aub.

I only know about one occasion in which both brothers and Pilar Bayona were togheter, and this was in Madrid, in May 1936, when they went to the musical parties at the Residencia de Estudiantes. (when the photo of the homage paid to H. Viñes was taken). Alfonso was also a Pilar’s admirer and close friend -he named himself her "lieutenant"- in the forties, and also when he was in Madrid working with Juan Pérez Páramo, and until his early death.
Alfonso Buñuel designed some pieces of furniture, one of them, a divan, which always presided over every sitting room Pilar Bayona and her sister had.
I don’t remember have seen published this photo with Alfonso Buñuel and Luis García-Abrines appearing (or disappearing) as if they were ghosts; here it is to demonstrate Buñuel’s magical and hypnotic powers.

 

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Both Luises

 


After Alfonso, the logical reference is Luis García-Abrines. Pilar Bayona’s home was full of García-Abrines hand made things. The carved olive stone and the hatbox divided in quarters, with dolls performing each one of the acts of Debussy’s La boîte à joujoux are lost, but it still exists a little scale model of a corner in a room with the two pianos, and a portrait of Pilar Bayona on the wall, which in its size is an excellent caricature. It also remains his surprising and provocative letters, a picture, and many others things.
If anything is known about García-Abrines and Alfonso Buñuel’s relationship, I know little about the one between the former and Luis Buñuel. I have the Abrines’ book Crisicollages for Luis Buñuel and I have read in a book by Pérez Lizano about their meeting in 1975, in Mexico, on which Gª Abrines said "we spoke neither about surrealism, nor cinema, nor collages, but about suicide and Pilar Bayona".
In 1980 Gª Abrines wrote a text for the folder of Pilar Bayona’s record edited by the City Hall of Saragossa. I can’t avoid quoting here the paragraph transcribing Luis Buñuel’s memory of P. Bayona: " You phoned me. I heard you badly, but I guessed that your call was due to having to tell me about the death of our dear friend Pilar Bayona. As some other men born in Saragossa I was in love with her when I was fourteen; it lasted till I was eighteen. Later I had a sincere friendship and admiration for her marvellous art. I know you have had similar feelings. Let her not rest in peace in our memory, but for her memory to remain always alive"

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My debt

 


I do not know if during my childhood I saw Luis Buñuel occasionally; consciously I only remember to have met him once, in the early seventies (probably in 1973), at Ricardo Urgoiti’s home in Madrid. Despite his deafness, the conversation was varied and pleasant, he even remembered my aunt Carmen in her childhood going to feed the rabbits. We also spoke about his last film release in Madrid The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. When I rushed to say that I intended to see it as soon as it was possible, he told us that they showed a censored version of the movie. There was a scene in which a bishop, after hearing the confession of a dying man, takes a gun and shoots the ill man before leaving. Buñuel asked me to whistle and boo when this scene arrived, as a sign of protest towards the stupidity of censorship. The day I went to see the film, when the moment arrived, I began to boo timidly but I immediately stopped as I could not bring myself to stir up trouble among an audience who were probably ignorant of the reason for my doing it. I was not brave enough to carry out his request in secret solidarity with him.
A feeling of treachery has always remained. A discomfort due to this debt which will remain for ever unpaid.

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