Hi, Geo-Steve.
A couple of years ago, there was a question pretty much along the lines of what you asked; you could probably ask Borderstone or someone else to look it up (B'stone has a penchant for finding long-lost threads and reviving them--I'm grateful for that) The long and the short of it (mostly the long, since as a prof. it's in my contract to be a windbag) is that there is quite a bit of Cervantes' book in the song and the poem, although with a 1970's sort of take; around then DQ was celebrated as an idealist and a dreamer (although the line "he shouts across the ocean to the shore" shows how futile his efforts are). Again, if you find the thread, you'll see some details of what was said.
There have been lots of other interpretations of the novel--at present, I'm looking at an analysis from the 1930s by Ramiro de Maeztu that basically says that Cervantes was showing the decline of Spain and that DQ was basically an anachronistic figure showing how Spain's Golden Age was ending while falling well short of its goals and ideals. There's room for that interpretation, and many others as well--one thing that Spanish literature of that generation did, and Cervantes did particularly well, was to show the validity of many contradictory interpretations of "truth", because of the basically contradictory nature of life itself.
I think that's one of the reasons that I enjoy GL's music; there's a basic idealism that forms the core of his music, but there is acknowledgment of real life, real problems and failings, as people go about this business of life. I could give many examples of parallels between Cervantes (both in his life and in his works) and GL (also both in his life and in his works) along these lines, but after all, it is summer vacation--class dismissed!
DQ
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