Janitzio (Revueltas)

Janitzio is a symphonic poem by the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, composed in 1933 and revised in 1936. A performance lasts about fifteen minutes. The work is a portrait of Janitzio Island in Lake Pátzcuaro, Mexico.

The score of Janitzio was completed on 31 July 1933 (Velazco 1986, 342) and was premiered under the composer's baton. According to some sources, this was by the Orquesta Sinfónica de México in the Teatro Hidalgo in Mexico City on 8 December 1933 (Velazco 1986, 341; Brennan 1998, 16). However, before it was unveiled to the audiences of the OSM, Revueltas had conducted it at the Palacio de Bellas Artes with the Orquesta del Conservatorio on 13 October 1933 in a program that also included Revueltas's own Ocho por radio, Daniel Ayala's Leyenda, and the first Mexican performance of Manuel Ponce's Canto y danza de los antiguos mexicanos (Slonimsky 1945, 250; Saavedra 2009, 306, 313–14, 325n84).

According to one source, Revueltas originally composed the work for the film Janitzio, directed by Carlos Navarro and starring Emilio Fernández (Standish and Bell 2004, 186). However, this film, released in 1935, was produced after Revueltas's score had already been premiered, and the film's music is credited to Francisco Domínguez.

Revueltas revised the score three years later, completing the new version on 30 December 1936 at the Sanitorio Ramírez Moreno in Mexico City, where he was hospitalized for fatigue and rehabilitation from alcoholism (Hernández 2009, 19; Velazco 1986, 342). The original version was dedicated to Carlos Chávez and Armando Echevarría (librarian of the OSM), but the 1936 revised score bears no dedication (Velazco 1986, 345).

Janitzio is a portrait of Janitzio Island in Lake Pátzcuaro, and is one of only two of Revueltas's works that refers directly to a Mexican landscape (the other is Cuauhnáhuac) (Mayer-Serra 1941, 127).

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