Romana Elena Burguez González

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Revered and popular Cuban singer of boleros and romantic ballads. The "Lady of Feeling" as she was known in life, was the best singer of the Filin (feeling) movement that Cuba had.

Elena lived to sing, from her early days when she was a child and visited the filin boys in Callejón de Hamel. From then on she was the interpretive vehicle for all genres and all authors, Cuban or otherwise. As a child she sang tangos, rumbitas, guarachas and sones... she went crazy singing that and people got excited. She went to listen to music at Angelito Díaz's house, where César Portillo de la Luz, José Antonio Méndez, Justo Fuentes, Pablo Reyes, Armando Peñalver and others would gather. The funniest thing is that they were all men and she, right there among them.

She had her professional beginnings as a vocalist with the orchestra of the radio station Mil Diez, directed by maestros Adolfo Guzmán and Enrique González Mantici in the 1940s. From there, several vocal groups saw her progress until Dámaso Pérez Prado arrived and she became his first accompanying pianist.

Later she entered as a central figure in the shows performed at the Teatro Fausto and the Tropicana of Cuba. Elena, who had danced with Litico at the Tropicana and also was part of a Cuban show in Jamaica, demonstrating her dancing talents to satisfy the appetite of an audience eager for Cuban rumbas, guarachas and sones, evoked those moments with charm and wit: "I like to dance, I like to sing... I like music. What do you want, that's just how I am!"

Elena Burke's first foray into the world of song was in a radio contest. Her first contact with music was through tango, particularly Caminito, which she sang in 1940 on the radio station CMC. From then on her career grew until she became one of the artists most beloved by the Cuban people. In 1943, she performed at La Corte Suprema del Arte on CMQ Radio, where she won a prize along with Rosita Fornés and Miguel Ángel Ortiz. That same year she began working at the radio station Mil Diez, in the program Ensoñación, with an orchestra directed by Enrique González Mántici and Adolfo Guzmán.

In 1947 she was one of the founders of Las Mulatas de Fuego, which debuted at the Fausto theater, and subsequently performed at the Alkázar and Encanto (with Josephine Baker) with Serenata mulata, and later presented Rapsodia en bronce y negro, under the direction of pianist and composer Felo Bergaza; they then traveled to Mexico, their first trip abroad in 1950, where they were hired by the Follies Bergère, where they performed alongside Yolanda Montes (Tongolele). There she was discovered by Emilio El Indio Fernández who, amazed by her voice, invited her to participate in the filming of Salón México. In this period she joined the Cuartetto of Facundo Rivero with which she made a long tour through Central and South America.

After completing all her foreign commitments she returned to Cuba and joined Orlando de la Rosa's ensemble. They worked in some places in Havana and shortly after went to the United States, on a circuit of nightclubs and hotels that marked an incessant activity, in which they performed numbers directed by him —Vieja luna, Nuestras vidas, Eres mi felicidad...—, which would later become famous.

Before embarking as a soloist she belonged to famous groups such as the Cuartetos of Facundo Rivera, Orlando de la Rosa and the very famous Cuarteto D'Aida. Her artistic journey made an important stop when she met pianist and orchestra director Aída Diestro, who worked at CMQ Radio and whom she encouraged to be part of a vocal group she had planned together with Moraima Secada, Omara and Haydeé Portuondo. In August 1952 they debuted at the Carrousell de la Alegría, a television program presented by Germán Pinelli. They had just put together two numbers: Mamey colorado and Cosas del alma. From there they moved to the Show de mediodía and that made them think about expanding their repertoire, so they arranged: Que jelengue, Profecía, Ya no me quieras and Las mulatas del cha cha cha. Everything promised success; however, irregularity in contracts fractured the project and led to the group's separation.

Elena expressed: "I thought about it a lot, however it may be we had achieved something important in our lives. We had a very unique style that pleased both our own people and foreigners and that gave our work prospects. We made some tours abroad, we recorded an album accompanying Nat King Cole and another as a duet with Lucho Gatica, but I think there came a moment when each of us needed to establish ourselves separately and, well, we said goodbye, without sorrow and without tears."

In 1957, Álvarez Guedes produced Elena Burke's first long-playing record for his Gema label. He set splendid conditions from an orchestral point of view, so that she could display her powerful credentials as one of the most important voices of the songbook in Spanish language during the 20th century. Separated from her friends, Elena went in search of something that would define her. A style that, in addition to her gift for expression, would provide her freedom to interpret any song. And that "something" she found quickly within herself, since in her was the gift of expression as one of her highest qualities. Then La Burke became the ideal interpreter for every composer, because while she learned the song by internalizing the author's motivations, she made the words visible, the most subtle metaphor with characteristic gestures and, at the same time, with an expressive force of rapture.

In the 1960s she founded the group Los D'Ángeles, directed by Enriqueta Almanza. She represented Cuba at the IV Festival of Málaga, Spain, and at the International Song Festival of Viña del Mar, Chile. In 1964 she made a tour through Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and participated in the closing ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival; in 1965 she performed at the Olympia in Paris, with the cast of the Gran Music Hall of Cuba, and in 1966 at the Sopot Festival, where she placed fifth, and at the Orfeo de Oro, Bulgaria.

She participated in Montreal's Expo'67. She performed at the Cardini Internacional in Mexico, and presented herself at that country's II International Record Festival, alongside Dámaso Pérez Prado, Ray Charles and Armando Manzanero.

She participated with Los Van Van in the show taken to Expo'70 in Osaka, Japan. In 1978 she performed at Lincoln Center in New York, with the Orquesta Aragón and Los Papines. She performed in Canada, and in the United States shared the dressing room with Judy Garland.

Enriqueta Almanza, one of her most frequent piano accompanists, said it was not easy to accompany Elena: "She does not allow falling into routines. Even with repeated songs, she always makes unusual variations of a version. On a stage you have to go around hunting for her, because she never delivers a number the same way twice. And I'm not speaking only of the musical, but of the emotion."

For his part Frank Domínguez, the composer of Tú me acostumbraste, of which Elena was his first interpreter, commented on Elena's style and her musical capacity, emphasizing the importance of "harmonic ear." "She doesn't read music, but she knows how to demand the perfect chord. And if she changes the melody, ultimately, she enhances it with her feeling. But if the accompanist varies even a note, with her arrow-like gaze, over the shoulder, she is capable of asking in the middle of a performance: 'what is that?' Elena is unique, she has elevated songs without such vigor from her version."

La Burke spent her last years sick, in silence, away from show business, accompanied only by her memories and occasional visits from her loved ones. She was rarely seen in public, except that December night in 1999 when family and friends gathered at the Habana Café of the Meliá Hotel to celebrate another year of her life. She died in 2002 from AIDS.

She was the mother of Malena Burke and grandmother of Lena, also well-known Cuban singers.

Before her death, with her health already quite deteriorated, Elena Burke wanted to sing at the National Theater of Havana. The anecdote of the concert happened when she was about to sing Yolanda, by Pablo Milanés, before a packed audience, and forgot the lyrics. It was then that 2,000 people sang to Elena Burke. Sitting in a chair, she cried as she listened to the song.

Nicknamed the Lady of Feeling, Elena Burke managed to move audiences. The lyrics contained in her songs along with fantastic musical ornamentation provoked in the viewer the sensation of living a unique experience.

Throughout her six decades of artistic life she represented the peculiar case of an interpreter who, by the quality of her technique and the sound of her voice, managed to make of the song a timeless art, achieving reconciliation of the absent past in future perfect tense, that is: she cultivated the songwriting tradition, while experimenting with the new lyrical forms of our times, converting her work into a rich and complex fruit of great human and musical stature. Elena dominated a vast repertoire that comprises at least the last five decades of the Cuban songbook, from the height of traditional trovadorism to the most refined interpretation of contemporary song.

She was one of the few, if not the only one, who managed to combine with wisdom and good taste styles as varied as those of Ernesto Lecuona, Silvio Rodríguez, Ignacio Piñeiro, Sindo Garay, Mirta Silva or Pablo Milanés. And that is not an identification, but the most conclusive proof of her condition as a great stylist, which allowed her in life to encompass every register and every chord that exists on the musical staff; because she discovered with her voice the marvel of the new.

Discography:
La Señora Sentimiento (reissued 1991)
Canta lo sentimental (reissued 1993)
De noche (reissued 1995).

Outstanding Interpretations:
Amame como soy
Tal vez
Duele