Manuel de Falla, (born November 23, 1876, Cádiz, Spain—died November 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Argentina), was the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early 20th century. In his music, he achieved a fusion of poetry, asceticism, and ardour that represents the spirit of Spain at its purest.
Falla took piano lessons from his mother and later went to Madrid to continue studying piano under José Tragó and to study composition with Felipe Pedrell. Pedrell inspired Falla with his own enthusiasm for 16th-century Spanish church music, folk music, and native opera, or zarzuela. In 1905 Falla won two prizes, one for piano playing and the other for a national opera, La vida breve (first performed in Nice, France, 1913).
Zarazuelas are is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular songs, as well as dance.
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. From Paris, he published his first piano pieces and songs. In 1914 he returned to Madrid, where he wrote the music for a ballet, El amor brujo (Love, the Magician; Madrid, 1915), remarkable for its distillation of Andalusian folk music. Falla followed this with El corregidor y la molinera (Madrid, 1917), which Diaghilev persuaded him to rescore for a ballet by Léonide Massine called El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat; London, 1919). Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain; Madrid, 1916), a suite of three impressions for piano and orchestra, evoked the Andalusian atmosphere through erotic and suggestive orchestration. All these works established Falla internationally as the leading Spanish composer.
Falla then retired to Granada, where in 1922 he organized a cante hondo festival and composed a puppet opera, El retablo de Maese Pedro. Like the subsequent Harpsichord Concerto (1926), containing echoes of Domenico Scarlatti, the Retablo shows Falla much influenced by Igor Stravinsky. Falla’s style was then Neoclassical instead of Romantic, still essentially Spanish, but Castilian rather than Andalusian.
Also in Granada, de Falla began work on the large-scale orchestral cantata Atlàntida (Atlantis) based on the Catalan text L’Atlàntida by Jacint Verdaguer, which he considered to be the most important of all his works. Verdaguer’s text gives a mythological account of how the submersion of Atlantis created the Atlantic ocean, thus separating Spain and Latin America, and how later the Spanish discovery of America reunited what had always belonged together. De Falla continued work on the cantata after moving to Argentina in 1939. The orchestration of the piece remained incomplete at his death and was completed posthumously by Ernesto Halffter.
De Falla tried but failed to prevent the murder of his close friend the poet Federico García Lorca in 1936. Following Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, de Falla left Spain for Argentina. He died in Alta Gracia, in the Argentine province of Córdoba. In 1947 his remains were brought back to Spain and entombed in the cathedral at Cádiz. One of the lasting honors to his memory is the Manuel de Falla Chair of Music in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at Complutense University of Madrid.
It began with a childhood dream growing up in Nova Scotia. At the age of 18 months, Kevin’s first teacher was his mom.
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Honoured as one of the University of Saskatchewan’s Arts and Science Alumni of Influence, Saskatchewan born contralto Lisa Hornung enjoys a singing career that has taken her across Canada, the United States and Europe. Lisa is always pleased to perform with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra with whom she has sung for over 30 years.