Manuel de Falla

At the centre of the Spanish musical renaissance of the early 20th century stood Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), who enthusiastically applied modern methods to composing. His works oscillate between a nuanced, clearly defined colourfulness and a tendency towards harshness and austerity of sound.

De Falla was born in Cádiz in Andalusia, where he grew up until moving to Madrid in 1896 to study piano and composition. After publishing several minor piano works and songs, de Falla entered a competition to promote Spanish national opera, which he won in 1905 with his one-act opera La vida breve. In 1907, after the Madrid Opera refused to perform the award-winning piece, his frustration prompted him to leave his homeland for Paris. There he lived in precarious circumstances for a long time, getting by as best as he could by giving piano lessons, but he eventually won the recognition of musicians such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky and met other influential figures including Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the famous Ballets Russes. It was thanks to the support of his prominent composer colleagues that a revised version of La vida breve was staged in Nice and Paris. With these successes behind him, de Falla returned to Madrid in August 1914, where his opera had a belated premiere in November. The audience response was enthusiastic enough, although not to the degree of the rapturous reception of the premiere of Nights in the Gardens of Spain two years later.

In the period that followed, de Falla established himself internationally as a composer. He returned to Andalusia in 1920 and settled in Granada. His acquaintance with Diaghilev bore fruit in the form of the ballet The Three-Cornered Hat, whose two orchestral suites are probably de Falla’s most frequently performed compositions today.  The pianist Arthur Rubinstein also became an advocate of de Falla’s music, which was at the height of its fame in the late 1920s. In 1927, he embarked on an ambitious project, the scenic cantata Atlántida, based on an epic poem in the Catalan language. The work was to occupy him until the end of his life, but remained unfinished.

The military coup in 1936 fundamentally changed de Falla’s situation. Initially, he was not opposed to Franco’s fascist regime, but then distanced himself from it. Despite all the advances made to him by the regime, he used a concert tour to Argentina in 1938 as an opportunity to emigrate. Even after the war ended, he opted not to return to Spain and died in Argentina in 1946.