Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) is among the best-known proponents of Music Nationalism of Spain. He was a piano prodigy who gave his first public concert when he was four, and at age six he was denied admittance to the Paris Conservatory only because he was too young. But shortly thereafter he enrolled in what is now the Royal Conservatory in Madrid, and young Isaac soon became known as the greatest prodigy in Spain. In 1875, he gave a series of concerts in Puerto Rico and Cuba, but this was not the result of the 15-year-old youth stowing away on a ship to the New World, as many reputable sources have previously repeated. Rather less romantically, it now appears that Isaac accompanied his father, a customs official, to Cuba when his father was transferred to work there. In 1876, back in the Old World, a 16-year-old Isaac was granted a Spanish royal stipend to study at the Brussels Conservatory. In 1879, he took First Prize in piano performance in Brussels, and embarked on a highly successful concert tour of Europe. At twenty, he travelled to Budapest hoping to study with Liszt. But when this dream went unrealized (Liszt had already departed Hungary for Italy), Albéniz returned to Spain and toured the country both as a pianist and, for a time, the conductor and manager of a musical theater company.

Following a South American tour he settled in Barcelona in 1883, and there he met Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922), a musicologist and composer who convinced Albéniz that it was important for Spanish composers to write music based on the characteristic folk songs and dances of their homeland. This turned out to be very good advice--although Albéniz also continued to compose music in a more-or-less cosmopolitan style, it is for his Spanish-flavored music that he is most remembered. He lived in London in the early 1890s, and moved to Paris in 1894, where he befriended many of the city's leading composers and began to absorb the influences of the recently-departed César Franck (1822-1890) and the still-going-strong Claude Debussy (1862-1918). As a virtuoso performer Albéniz was compared to Liszt and Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894), but soon after the turn of the century bad health impeded his performance career. When Albéniz died in 1909, he was virtually incapacitated from Bright's Disease, a chronic kidney disorder.

Composed between 1905 and 1909, Iberia is a collection of 12 pieces for solo piano, organized into four books of three pieces each. It is ranked universally among the finest works by any Spanish composer, and French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) extended his praise beyond geographic boundaries, calling Iberia "the wonder for the piano; it is perhaps on the highest place among the more brilliant pieces for the king of the instruments." Subtitled "Twelve New Impressions," Iberia was designed as a kind of musical travelogue, with each piece representing a particular locale, primarily in southern Spain, and drawing upon rhythmic and melodic gestures suggestive of each place. The harmonic soundscape also pays tribute to the Impressionism of Debussy, and, in something of a reversal, Debussy became a big fan ofIberia, such that the Spaniard's vibrant music provided inspiration for the Frenchman. But the virtuosic (sometimes bordering on sadistic) piano writing of Iberia is all Albéniz--and it is sometimes so difficult that it's said Albéniz considered destroying the pieces because, in his disease-weakened state, he was unable to play through them himself. In discussing the dozen pieces that comprise Iberia, the Portuguese virtuoso Artur Pizzaro observed: "The technical writing is totally original and at least as mind-numbingly difficult as Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. ... The only reason I can think of as to why they are not more present in recital halls throughout the world is the sheer difficulty of their performance."

El Puerto (The Port) is the second piece in Book 1, and the "puerto" in question is the fishing town of El Puerto de Santa Maria, near Cádiz on the southern Atlantic coast of Spain. The music itself is a zapateado, a kind of flamenco tap-dance that the conquistadores borrowed from the native Mexican Indians (along with their gold and corn). So it is perhaps especially fitting that a zapateado represents El Puerto de Santa Maria, since it is the very port where Columbus set sail on his second trip to the Americas.

Book 3 of Iberia opens with El Albaicín, which depicts the Albayzín district of Granada overlooking the Alhambra. Along with the Alhambra, Albayzín has been designated an UNESCO World Heritage site, with its architectural reminders of the area's Medieval Moorish past. In his musical portrait of the district, Albéniz draws on the percussive rhythms introduced by the North Africans, and he conjures a fully-realized gypsy flamenco dance, by turns fiery, ethereal and gracefully sensual, and replete with aural images of stamping feet, clapping castinets and a flashing guitar.