The music is Morisco music, found on Iberian Garden, Vol. 1 by
Altramar. The piece is Muwashshah: Mā li-l-muwallah, 1113-1198.
This music takes place at the beautiful gardens along the Guadalquiver, near Cordoba.
This is during the "convivencia" under Alfonso X (El Sabio - The Wise), the time
before Granda fell: when Christians, Moslems and Jews lived at peace with each
other. Muwashshah are songs in poetic form, with instrumental interludes in the
form of Ibn Bājja (Avempace): 1470-1520. This is Morisco art.
"El Abencerraje" is a poem about honour, especially the special
honour known as knightly chivalry between Catholic Iberian knights and
Iberian Morisco knights. Very similar to "Gerusalemme liberata"
by Torquato Tasso, or "Orlando Furioso" by Ludovico Aristo. All
three poems concern the chivalry of Christian knights and Saracen knights.
Highly educated contemporary people continually emphasize this literature
of Christian poetry, and these poems have been used in operas and music,
as well. Not to doubt that such chivalry existed and was influential!
However, we must not forget that when the Moriscos were expelled from Spain,
most of the Morisco men were murdered, most Morisco women were raped, the
surviving men, women and children were enslaved and put in fetters for life,
and all Morisco property stolen. This suggests (strongly) that this chivalry
found in poems, music and opera, was not much more than propaganda: rhetoric
to hide the ugly racism and religious intolerance found during the Holy Inquisition.
This category of propaganda was not a temporary or geographically isolated
phenomena. At the roughly the same time (1609-1614) as the expulsion of the
Spanish Moriscos, the German Peasant Rebellions (1524-1525) took place, but
this time it was not Catholic tyranny, but Lutheran tyranny.
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