Enrico Caruso has been called the greatest tenor who ever lived, but Miguel Fleta may have been better. Unfortunately, Fleta was on the “wrong” side of the Spanish Civil War.
I had never heard of Fleta or knew much Spanish history until a friend of mine met one of his descendants. I learned that when Spain held elections in 1933 under their new constitution, many right-wing parties came to power. These were faced with constant revolts until February of 1936, when left-wing groups came to power. In July of that same year, the Spanish Civil War began. Officially, the war was between the left-wing Republican government and the right-wing Nationalist rebels. It has also been called a battle between the cities and the country, between peasants and landowners, between the new and the old, and between Communists and Nazis.
There were many foreigners, including George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and Lilian Hellman who went to Spain in support of the Republicans. By the time Franco’s Nationalist forces won in 1939, hundreds of Americans had died in the fighting.
Miguel Fleta ended his promising opera career in 1935 because of his health, a chaotic personal life, and his desire to support the Nationalist cause in his native Spain. Because he was on the opposite side of the war from many “intellectuals”, his work has been largely shunned and forgotten outside of Spain.
His story reminds us that the good people are not always all on the side of the media and the intellectuals.