Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Albéniz was born in 1860 in Camprodon, a small town in Catalonia, in the north-east of Spain, near the French border. His father was a customs officer. The family moved to Barcelona when Isaac was a baby. His older sister taught him the piano, and at four he gave his first public concert in Barcelona. It is said that some people in the audience thought a grown-up pianist was hiding behind the curtain. At seven his parents took him to Paris to enter the Conservatoire. He passed the piano test, but he was not admitted. According to his own story, he was so excited that he threw a ball and broke a mirror, and the teachers decided he was too young. Albéniz loved telling stories about himself, and not all of them were true. For years he said that he had run away from home at nine and travelled alone to America, paying his way with concerts. At 16 he went to study in Brussels, with money from the King of Spain, and at 19 he won the first prize for piano there.

In 1883, at 23, he settled in Barcelona and met two people who changed his life. One was Felipe Pedrell, 19 years older, a composer who had spent his life collecting Spanish folk songs. Pedrell told him that Spanish composers should build on the music of their own people. The other was his pupil Rosina Jordana, whom he married that year. Until then he had been a pianist who toured and played other people's music. Now he began to write piano pieces about the cities and regions of Spain: Granada, Sevilla, Cádiz, Asturias. He never copied folk tunes. Instead he made the piano sound like a guitar and a flamenco singer. Many of these pieces are now world-famous on the guitar, an instrument he never wrote for. Barcarola is from the same years, when he was 28 and at the height of his fame as a pianist.

In 1890, at 30, he moved to London for three years, and then to Paris. In London a rich banker who wrote poetry, Francis Money-Coutts, offered him a deal: a yearly income for life, if Albéniz would set his opera texts to music. Albéniz accepted. The operas were not successful, but the income freed him from concert tours, and the two men became real friends. In Paris he became a friend of Fauré, Dukas, d'Indy and Chausson, and he taught the piano at a new music school there. He also helped younger Spanish composers. In 1907 the young Falla, 16 years younger, arrived in Paris with no money. Albéniz, who was famous by then, got him a grant from the King of Spain. He also helped his friend Granados, seven years younger and a pupil of Pedrell, to get his music published.

Albéniz was a big, cheerful man who laughed loudly at his own jokes. Arthur Rubinstein, later one of the most famous pianists of the century, met him in Paris as a young man. He remembered a very happy, fat man from Spain who told very funny stories. At first Rubinstein took him for a salesman. His friend Dukas called him "a Don Quixote with the manners of Sancho Panza." He meant that Albéniz had the big dreams of the knight in the famous Spanish novel, but the round body and the jokes of the knight's servant. He was generous with both affection and money, and his house in Paris was open to any young Spanish artist in trouble. From about 1900 he suffered from kidney disease. Between the ages of 45 and 48 he wrote his masterpiece, Iberia, twelve piano pieces about Spain. They are so difficult that he is said to have thought of burning them. But two pianist friends showed him that they could be played. Debussy wrote that the music was so full of colours and pictures that it dazzled him. He died in May 1909 in the French Pyrenees, at 48. A few weeks before his death, France gave him the Legion of Honour, and his friend Granados brought the medal to his bedside. Albéniz turned Spain into piano music. Before him, Spanish composers wrote like Italians or Germans. After him, Granados, Falla and Turina all built on what he had done, and Debussy and Ravel learned from him too.