(Sp.: ‘salad’).
A kind of Quodlibet popular in 16th-century Spain. It is first mentioned in Gil Vicente's Auto da fé, which was performed on Christmas morning in 1510 before Manuel I of Portugal. The auto concluded with ‘a salad that came from France’, which has not been identified. Vicente used another ensalada, En el mes era de Maio, to conclude the Auto chamado dos físicos (c1512), the music of which is lost. The earliest musical ensaladas appear in the Cancionero Musical de Palacio (E-Mp 1335, c1500), the oldest being perhaps Garcimuñós's Una montaña pasando, a four-part setting that incorporates the song Ay triste de mi ventura, the refrain Madre mía, muriera yo and a fragment of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis. Two works by Francisco de Peñalosa are classified as ensaladas, the six-part Por las sierras de Madrid, in which four refrains from different songs are sung simultaneously, and Tú que vienes de camino, the text of which includes phrases in several languages.
The genre reached its height with the ensaladas of Mateo Flecha (i), who composed at least 11 in four or five parts, eight of which were published by his nephew and namesake, Mateo Flecha (ii), as Las ensaladas de Flecha (Prague, 158113). All have a text based on humorous verse with irregular metre, written in Spanish, throughout which are inserted quotations from songs and refrains in Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and Latin; the texts always contain a reference to Christmas. In many cases the quotations extend to the main melody; La viuda, for example, contains 11 verbal quotations of which at least four are also musical. The pieces are subdivided into sections – from seven to 12 – that alternate homophonic and imitative passages, providing the text with music of a descriptive character that requires frequent changes of rhythm. They vary in length from 215 to 400 bars in modern transcription.
Other composers of ensaladas include Bartolomé Cárceres, who, in La trulla, confined himself to linking various songs with transitional polyphonic passages. In this he differs from the elder Flecha, whose quotations form a subtle verbal and musical fabric in which it is difficult to distinguish his own work from that of others. The younger Flecha included Cárceres's ensalada La trulla in the 1581 volume of Ensaladas, which also contains two by Pere Alberch, one by Chacón and two others by Flecha himself, who was probably one of the last composers to use the genre. In contrast to the other known ensaladas, Flecha's La feria confines itself to quoting a fragment of a ballad that recurs throughout the work. Apart from an anonymous handwritten ensalada, Salgan damas galanes (E-Mmc 607), the other ensaladas known to have existed – more than 20 – do not appear to have survived.
Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia used the term ‘ensalada’ as the title of one of his organ works because of the variety of styles and thematic material it contains. Enríquez de Valderrábano in his Silva de sirenas (1547) gave the title ‘Soneto, a manera de ensalada’ to an adaptation for voice and vihuela of the quodlibet Corten espadas afiladas (E-Mmc 13230).
H. Anglès: Mateo Flecha: las ensaladas (Barcelona, 1954)
M. Querol: ‘Las ensaladas’ de Mateo Flecha el viejo (ca. 1481–1553) (Barcelona, 1980)
J.M. Gregori: Pere Alberch i Vila: el bon jorn (Barcelona, 1983)
M.C. Gómez: F. Matheo Flecha: la feria y las Cañas (ensaladas) (Madrid, 1987)
D. Preciado: ‘La canción tradicional española en las ensaladas de Mateo Flecha el viejo’, RdMc, x (1987), 460–88
M.C. Gómez: Mateu Fletxa: la viuda (ensalada) (Barcelona, 1992)
M.C. Gómez: ‘The Ensalada and the Origins of the Lyric Theater in Spain’, Comparative Drama, xxviii (1994), 367–93; repr. in Cultura y representación en la Edad Media: Elx 1992, ed. E. Rodríguez Cuadros (Valencia, 1994), 191–212
For further bibliography see Quodlibet.
MARICARMEN GÓMEZ