MUSIC

Impressionism 5 / 7

Manuel de Falla

(1876 – 1946)

A marvelous selection of Impressionism in music is this one, with well recognized composers as part of a heritage of beauty and harmony born in the souls of remarkable musicians between the end of XIX and beginning of the XX century.

We hope your taste for good quality is satisfied by this initial number of renown names of the so called impressionism.

ALMO

almoxxi.blogspot.com

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia . . .

Manuel de Falla y Matheu ( 23 November 1876 – 14 November 1946) was a Spanish composer and pianist. Along with Isaac Albéniz, Francisco Tárrega, and Enrique Granados, he was one of Spain's most important musicians of the first half of the 20th century. He has a claim to being Spain's greatest composer of the 20th century, although the number of pieces he composed was relatively modest.

Falla was born Manuel María de los Dolores Falla y Matheu in Cádiz. He was the son of José María Falla, a Valencian, and María Jesús Matheu, from Catalonia.

In 1889 he continued his piano lessons with Alejandro Odero and learned the techniques of harmony and counterpoint from Enrique Broca. At age 15 he became interested in literature and journalism and founded the literary magazines El Burlón and El Cascabel.

By 1900 he was living with his family in the capital, where he attended the Real Conservatorio de Música y Declamación. He studied piano with José Tragó, a colleague of Isaac Albéniz, and composition with Felip Pedrell. In 1897 he composed Melodía for cello and piano and dedicated it to Salvador Viniegra, who hosted evenings of chamber music that Falla attended. In 1899, by unanimous vote, he was awarded the first prize at the piano competition at his school of music. He premiered his first works: Romanza para violonchelo y piano, Nocturno para piano, Melodía para violonchelo y piano, Serenata andaluza para violín y piano, and Cuarteto en Sol y Mireya. That same year he started to use de with his first surname, making Manuel de Falla the name he became known as from that time on. When only the surname is used, however, the de is omitted.

Falla moved to Paris in 1907, where he remained for seven years. There he met a number of composers who had an influence on his style, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas, as well as Igor Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt, Isaac Albéniz and the impresario Sergei Diaghilev.^[1] In 1908 King Alfonso XIII awarded him a royal grant that enabled him to remain in Paris while he finished his Cuatro piezas españolas. In 1910 Falla met Stravinsky and in 1911–12 traveled to London, Brussels and Milan to give concerts and investigate possible venues for La vida breve, which he had composed shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1907 but which, despite the support of Dukas and Falla's own best efforts, was not finally performed until 1 April 1913 at the Municipal Casino in Nice, with the libretto translated into French by the dramatist Paul Milliet. A second production was given the following year at the Opéra-Comique, to acclaim from critics such as Pierre Lalo and André Coeuroy.^[1] He wrote Siete canciones populares españolas, which he finished in mid-1914. Shortly after, World War I began, forcing Falla to return to Madrid.^[1] While at no stage was he a prolific composer, it was then that he entered into his mature creative period.

In Madrid he composed several of his best-known pieces, including:

The nocturne for piano and orchestra Noches en los jardines de España (1916)
The ballet El amor brujo (1915) which includes the much excerpted and arranged Danza ritual del fuego
The ballet The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife (El corregidor y la molinera) which, after revision, became El sombrero de tres picos (1917) and was produced by Serge Diaghilev with set design and costumes by Pablo Picasso. It derives from The Three-Cornered Hat (1874), a novel written by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón.