Manuel Torre

Manuel Molina — born Manuel Ortega Vargas in Jerez around 1822, said to have taken 'Molina' as a stage name — never met Manuel Torre; he was gone before commercial recording existed to capture either man's voice. What survived was the melody itself, passed hand to hand through Jerez's singing families until it reached Torre as inherited property rather than direct instruction. Flamenco scholarship classifies two of Torre's own siguiriya recordings under a style still labeled 'Manuel Molina 1' — noting that Torre's version is 'a shortened version,' the older man's long unspooling verse lines compressed into Torre's own quicker, clipped delivery.

listen: upstream & heresource: canteytoque.es — Siguiriyas Audio Library (Manuel Molina 1 style classification, citing Molina & Mairena's Mundo y Formas del Cante Flamenco, 1963) ↗share

Manuel Molina's siguiriya style (traditional, unrecorded — Molina died before commercial recording existed)Manuel Molina

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1929

Te fuiste de mi veraManuel Torre

listen forOn 'Te fuiste de mi vera,' recorded in 1929 with the guitarist Miguel Borrull hijo, listen for how fast the verse turns over — each line clipped short and looped back on itself rather than drawn out, the compression scholars mean when they call Torre's version 'a shortened version' of Molina's original. It's also the style traditionally sung first in a set of siguiriyas — the genre's opening move, inherited whole from a man Torre never heard.

Enrique el Mellizo sang and drank in Cádiz, thirty miles and one generation ahead of Torre — a founder of the city's modern school of soleá and malagueña, prized for pushing those forms toward something quieter and more private than the crowd-pleasing cante of his day. Torre never studied under him, but Jerez and Cádiz sat close enough, in distance and era, that contact was inevitable; as the flamenco-history magazine Revista La Flamenca put it in 2004, Torre 'came to know the interpretive art of all the outstanding singers of Jerez and Cádiz of the second half of the nineteenth century,' el Mellizo chief among them.

listen: upstream & heresource: Revista La Flamenca — Flamenco Antiguo ↗share

Enrique el Mellizo's malagueña style (traditional, unrecorded — el Mellizo died in 1906, before commercial recording existed)Enrique el Mellizo

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1929

Por buscar la flor que amabaManuel Torre

listen forEl Mellizo died in 1906, three years before Torre's first recording session, so no record of his own voice survives to set against Torre's — only the Cádiz malagueña form he is credited with deepening. On 'Por buscar la flor que amaba,' cut in 1929 with Miguel Borrull hijo, listen for the unhurried, almost spoken opening lines before the melody tightens — the quieter, more interior malagueña style associated with el Mellizo's Cádiz school, set against the harder-edged Jerez siguiriyas that dominate the rest of Torre's discography.