El cantar del destierro

El Cid is a central figure in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. Although he lived in the second half of the 11th century, it was not until a hundred years later that the Cantar del Mio Cid was written, the epic poem through which we learn about the last stage of his life. The Cantar del destierro tells how Rodrigo is expelled from Castile, falsely accused of keeping the parias of Seville that he collected in the name of King Alfonso VI. Thus begins a journey to the borderland with the Taifas, between the present-day provinces of Burgos, Soria and Guadalajara, where he begins a campaign of conquest in an attempt to regain royal favour.

It is said that the manuscript, the protagonist of a curious vicissitude, was found around 1834 by Pedro José Pidal y Carniado, first Viscount of Villaviciosa de Asturias and first Marquis of Pidal. Ramón Menéndez Pidal published the first transcription of El Cantar de Mío Cid in 1900. He tells how his grandfather, historian, scholar and bear-hunting enthusiast, found, in a butcher’s shop in Picos de Europa, the old pages of a parchment wrapped in pieces of butter.

From then on, the Menéndez Pidal family kept the manuscript, refusing cheques from galleries and museums all over the world. It spent some time in a box at the Bank of Spain and another in Geneva, a refuge from the dangers of the Civil War. Since 1970, it has been in the collections of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, on loan from the Fundación Juan March. There it has been thoroughly researched and studied. Today, we can all consult it in the collections of the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica.

To celebrate the 975th anniversary of the birth of the Cid, in 2023 we are preparing a programme in which medieval music and the music of oral tradition of the lands travelled through in the Destierro are set against each other. Works collected in the Manuscrito de Las Huelgas (c. 1400) and from the Gregorian and Andalusian traditions are poured into the same broth of harvest songs, wheel dances and the jotas of Castile and Aragon, interspersed with fragments of the Cantar so as not to lose sight of the route between Vivar and Atienza.

With the epic of the Cid as a common thread, we vindicate the history and heritage of one of the most depopulated areas of Europe.

PROGRAM