Biography
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was born on May 29th, 1860 in Camprodon (Gerona) to a Basque father and a Catalan mother. His passing was in Cambo-les-Bains (France) on May 18th 1909.
Albéniz’s father was a customs official on the French border. Shortly after Isaac’s birth, the family moved to Barcelona. There he received his first formal piano lessons and made his public debut.
At the time of the 1868 revolution, the family moved to Madrid, where Albéniz studied piano and music theory at the National School of Music and Declamation (Royal Conservatory).
Madrid served as a base for his concert tours throughout Spain, culminating in performances in Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1875. In May 1876 he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, but was there for less than two months. In September of that same year, thanks to a scholarship from King Alfonso XII, he enrolled at the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels, where he studied piano with Louis Brassin.
He finished his studies there in 1879, and was first prize cum laude in Brassin’s class. Despite popular belief, he never studied with Liszt.
After giving concerts again in Puerto Rico and Cuba, he returned to Spain, where he continued to perform frequently. His first works for the stage, three zarzuelas, date from this period (1881-82), but have disappeared.
In 1883 Albéniz settled in Barcelona and studied composition with Felipe Pedrell, who encouraged him to use Spanish popular music as inspiration for his compositions.
The same year he married Rosina Jordana, one of his piano students, with whom he had four children.
From 1886 to 1889 Albéniz lived in Madrid and continued to teach, give concerts and compose. The nationalist style of his work during this period is exemplarily demonstrated in his piano compositions such as the First Spanish Suite and Memories of Travel, whose numbers are musical evocations of various Spanish cities and regions.
He also wrote several vocal works during this period, most notably a collection of five songs based on the Rimas of Gustavo Adolfo Becquer.
The success of his concerts in Paris and London in 1889 encouraged him to seek his fortune outside of Spain. From 1890 to 1893 he lived in London and performed throughout Great Britain and the rest of Europe.
During this period, Albéniz also became interested in musical theater. His first major work made expressly for the stage was the operetta The Magic Opal, which premiered at the Lyric Theater in London in 1893.
Despite the success of this operetta, Isaac moved to Paris the following year and established his residence there for the rest of his life.
He became a close friend of Ernest Chausson, Charles Bordes, and Gabriel Faure; studied orchestration with Paul Dukas and counterpoint with Vincent d’Indy; He gave piano lessons at the Schola Cantorum, where he had Rene de Castera and Deodat de Severac as students. This stage of his life in Paris explains the growing French influence on his style, especially Impressionism.
San Antonio de la Florida, a one-act zarzuela, premiered in 1894 at the Teatro de Apolo in Madrid, but did not receive good reviews. The Spanish version of The Magic Opal (La sortija) was also premiered that same year in Madrid, which was also a failure.
Disappointed, but still determined to win over the Spanish public and critics, Albéniz returned to Paris and finished the opera Henry Clifford, which premiered at the Liceo de Barcelona the following year (in Italian, under the title Enrico Clifford).
The libretto, which sets the action in 15th-century England during the Wars of the Roses, was written by Albéniz’s friend and benefactor, Francis Burdett Money-Coutts, a wealthy lawyer and poet. Money-Coutts offered Albéniz his financial support in exchange for putting music to his librettos. Unfortunately, Henry Clifford was only moderately successful and has never been performed again.
For his next opera, Money-Coutts wrote a libretto based on Juan Valera’s novel, Pepita Jiménez. The opera premiered at the Barcelona Liceo in 1896 and was an important contribution to the development of Spanish national opera. It was Albéniz’s most successful stage work and was performed in successive years in Prague (1897), Brussels (1905), Paris (1923), and Barcelona (1926). The next collaboration between Albéniz and Money-Coutts was a trilogy based on Sir Thomas Malory’s romance More d’Arthur. The first opera, Merlin, was completed but never performed during the composer’s lifetime (it premiered at the Liceo in 1950). The second and third of the operas, Launcelot and Guenevere, were never finished.
Albéniz continued to compose piano music during his time of intense work in the theater. The Spain suites, Six Album Leaves (1890) and Chants d’Espagne (1891-94) continue in the same vein as his earlier works and contain some of his most beloved compositions.
La Vega (1897), the only existing number of a suite project entitled La Alhambra, shows us a high sophistication that would be the prelude to his most important work, the famous collection of twelve nouvelles “impressions” for piano entitled Iberia (1905-1908). The four “notebooks” that Iberia consists of, which contain three pieces each, were premiered by Blanche Selva in France between 1906 and 1909.
Albéniz also continued to compose songs, and in those years two important collections stand out, To Nellie: Six Songs and Quatre Melodies, both with lyrics by Money-Coutts.
In the last years of his life, Albéniz lived seasonally in Paris, Tiana and Nice. Although his relationship with Money-Coutts has often been described as a “Faust pact”, the generous and unconditional support that Albéniz received at all times from his English friend allowed him to live comfortably, receive medical treatment and devote his last energies to finishing the Iberia.
In 1909 his health worsened considerably and he moved to Cambo-les-Bains, on the Atlantic coast of the French Pyrenees, where he died on May 18th of a kidney ailment known as Bright’s disease. The French government posthumously awarded him the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Albéniz practically defined Spanish romanticism in terms of music and also had considerable influence on other later nationalist composers such as Turina or Falla. However, the high appreciation that Albéniz deserved from his contemporaries, especially in France, was not only a product of his virtuosity, the brilliance of his interpretations of the traditional repertoire or the originally and freshness of his own works (especially Iberia, very admired by Debussy). Albéniz was also a warm, charming and generous person, with a keen sense of humor, which always allowed him to make many friends and establish useful contacts. Albéniz was also very complex and there was a powerful melancholic streak underlying his personality.
Despite his lack of formal studies outside the field of music, Albéniz was highly educated, spoke several languages and was actively interested in politics and philosophy (he defined himself politically as liberal and religiously skeptical). Although his compositions evoke the images and sounds of Spain, he preferred to live far from his homeland, from which he felt uprooted.
Finally, although he had extraordinary credentials as a child prodigy and as a student of great masters, he often spread contradictory information about his youth among friends, journalists, and biographers, especially in relation to his travels to the Americas and his studies in Leipzig with Liszt. For this reason, most of the biographies on Albéniz contain many errors and discrepancies. However, the most recent studies have greatly contributed to our better understanding of the life and work of this great artist.
