Manuel de Falla

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Manuel de Falla y Matheu (November 23, 1876 – November 14, 1946) was a Spanish composer of classical music.

He was born in Cádiz. From the late 1890s he studied music in Madrid, piano with José Tragó and composition with Felipe Pedrell. It was from Pedrell that de Falla became interested in native Spanish music, particularly Andalusian flamenco (specifically cante jondo), the influence of which can be strongly felt in many of his works. Among his early pieces are a number of zarzuelas, but his first important work was the one-act opera La vida breve (A Brief Life, written in 1905, though revised before its premiere in 1913).

He spent the years 1907 to 1914 in Paris, where he met a number of composers who had an influence on his style, including the impressionists Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas. He wrote little more music, however, until his return to Madrid at the beginning of World War I.

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

The nocturne for piano and orchestra Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain, 1916)
The ballet El amor brujo (Love the Magician, 1915) which includes the much excerpted and arranged Ritual Fire Dance
The ballet El corregidor y la molinera (The Magistrate and the Miller's Wife) which, after revision, became El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1917) and was produced by Serge Diaghilev with set design by Pablo Picasso.

From 1921 to 1939 Manuel de Falla lived in Granada, where he wrote the puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter's Puppet Show, 1923) and a concerto for harpsichord and chamber ensemble (1926). In these works, the Spanish folk influence is somewhat less apparent than a kind of Stravinskian neo-classicism.

Also in Granada, he began work on the large-scale choral piece La Atlántida (Atlantis), based on a text by Jacinto Verdaguer, which he continued after moving to Argentina in 1939. The piece remained incomplete at his death (it 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 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.

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Partial list of works

The Three-cornered Hat No. 1
The Three-cornered Hat No. 2
El amor brujo (ballet) (The Love Wizard, also translated: Love the Magician)
Ritual Fire Dance
La vida breve (lyric drama) (A Brief Life, also translated: Life is Short)
Interlude and Dance
El retablo de maese Pedro (puppet opera)
Nights in the Gardens of Spain (Noches in los jardines de España) for piano and orchestra
Siete canciones populares españolas
Concerto for Harpsichord
Four Spanish Pieces for piano
Serenata andaluza for piano

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References

Manuel de Falla by Nancy Lee Harper (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998)
Manuel De Falla and Modernism in Spain by Carol A Hess (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

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