Male flamenco singer |
| Name:Antonio Fernández (?) |
"We entered when El Planeta, the veteran cantaor, who had a great style, according to those in the know, started singing a romance or a corrida (development of the Spanish ballad) after a prelude with a vihuela (early guitar) and two bandolines (a type of mandolin), which were the main components of the orchestra, and he began those penetrating trills straight away…" Serafín Estébanez Calderón, costumbrista writer.
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El Planeta is like a character from legends. We don´t know much about his life and art. The is only one written source that tells us about him: two literary portraits in the Escenas Andaluzas (1847) by the costumbrista writer Serafín Estébanez Calderón (1799-1867). Thanks to these we have a detailed physical description of his figure and some information about his singing.
According to Estébanez Calderón, El Planeta was a generic cantaor, who would sing cañas, serranas, seguiriyas, and even a romance. His seguiriya, the oldest one that we know about, had been rescued by Pepe Torre before it was finally lost. Estébanez also tells us, as does the only carving that we have depicting him (by D.F. Lameyer), that he used to accompany himself by playing the guitar.
Other pieces of information, from the few that we have about El Planeta, are that he settled in Triana when he was young, that he was a friend of El Fillo, that he was very popular and that he was considered a gypsy patriarch. Manolo Caracol claimed to be one one of his descendants. |
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