1860–1909 · Spain · Romantic
Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) was a Spanish pianist and composer, one of the founders of the Spanish national school of music. He wrote chiefly for the piano, weaving Spanish folk melody into classical form, and the high point of that line was the suite Iberia. He never wrote for the guitar himself, though transcriptions of many of his pieces became an important part of the guitar repertoire.
Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was born on 29 May 1860 in the town of Camprodon, in Spain's Girona province. His father, Ángel Albéniz, worked as a customs official, and his mother was María de los Dolores Pascual; besides his older sister Clementina, two more girls, Blanca and Enriqueta, grew up in the family. At just four years old the boy gave his first public performance, appearing at the Teatre Romea in Barcelona together with Clementina; in Barcelona he studied piano with Compta.
From the age of nine, his father began taking Isaac and Clementina on concert tours through the towns of northern Spain. Frequent travel was simply part of a customs official's job, and he combined his own business trips with his children's performances.
By the age of fifteen, in 1875, Albéniz had already given concerts across the world. At the same time he studied at the Madrid Conservatory, but tours that took him as far from home as the Americas kept interrupting these studies.
In 1876 Albéniz briefly enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory. That same year, Count Guillermo Morphy, King Alfonso's personal secretary, helped him secure a royal grant to study at the Brussels Conservatory; he graduated in 1879 with the first prize in piano, awarded unanimously.
A turning point came in 1883, when he met the composer and teacher Felip Pedrell: under his influence Albéniz turned to Spanish folk music — what he himself called “the golden veins of folk art.” At an 1888 Barcelona exposition, the piano maker Érard had already sponsored a series of twenty concerts of his music.
Back in Spain, Albéniz established himself as a virtuoso performer and began composing and conducting: at first he led a travelling company that staged zarzuelas. In 1883 he settled in Barcelona, where he studied composition with Pedrell, and in 1885 he moved to Madrid, where he again had the support of Count Morphy and became one of the teachers at the Instituto Filarmónico, which the count led; his works were published by the leading music publishers of the day, Benito Zozaya and Antonio Romero.
Once settled in Madrid, Albéniz composed at a fast pace: by 1886 he had already written more than fifty piano pieces, which audiences at his many concerts received with enthusiasm.
In 1883, Albéniz married Rosina Jordana Lagarriga; her father had once been mayor of the Gràcia district, and she had earlier been one of his own piano pupils. The couple had two children who survived into adulthood: their son Alfonso (1885–1941) and their daughter Laura (1890–1944), who became a well-known illustrator.
The peak of Albéniz's concert career came in 1889–1892, when he toured throughout Europe. In the early 1890s he lived in London and wrote music for musical comedies there; this drew the notice of a wealthy patron, Francis Money-Coutts, who began commissioning operas from him and writing the librettos for them himself. He moved to London together with his wife, Rosina, and their children.
In London Albéniz worked at the Lyric Theatre, writing extra numbers and reworking musical comedies. At the request of the impresario Henry Lowenfeld he wrote the comic opera El Ópalo Mágico, in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan — it opened at the Lyric in January 1893, and was later translated into Spanish and staged in Madrid as La Sortija.
Money-Coutts was heir to the fortune of the London bank Coutts & Co, and besides music he wrote poetry and plays as an amateur dramatist. In July 1894 that same Money-Coutts bought out Albéniz's contract, and his financial support let the composer live comfortably for the rest of his life. Their collaboration produced the operas Henry Clifford (staged at Barcelona's Liceu theatre in 1895) and Pepita Jiménez (at the same theatre in 1896, and later in Prague and Brussels), as well as the first part of a planned trilogy on Arthurian legend — the opera Merlin (1898–1902), never staged in the composer's lifetime; he never finished the second part, Lancelot, and never began the third.
In the 1890s Albéniz moved to Paris and grew close to French musicians such as Vincent d'Indy, Gabriel Fauré and others. Claude Debussy was among his acquaintances; Debussy himself admitted that Albéniz's music offered such an abundance of vivid, varied impressions that it made one want to close one's eyes, as if against too bright a sun.
In these same years Albéniz wrote songs to prose texts by Pierre Loti and to English texts by Money-Coutts himself; his last completed vocal work was the cycle Quatre mélodies, set to poems by Money-Coutts, close in language and texture to Iberia.
In 1900, due to illness, Albéniz returned to Spain, where he worked with Enrique Morera to promote Catalan music for the stage, but then left for Paris again — there his work was received far more warmly. His Paris home became a place where young Spanish musicians found support, among them Joaquín Turina and Manuel de Falla.
In 1900 Albéniz began to suffer from kidney disease — nephritis — and that year he returned to writing piano music. From 1905 he was writing his major late cycle, the suite Iberia, made up of twelve piano pieces.
Albéniz spent his final years at the head of a new movement in Spanish music, the Renacimiento, or “renaissance.”
Just weeks before his death, France made Albéniz a Knight of the Legion of Honour, the country's highest distinction. He died on 18 May 1909 in the town of Cambo-les-Bains, in south-western France, aged 48, from kidney disease, and is buried at Barcelona's Montjuïc Cemetery.
Albéniz's piano works — some three hundred of them — make up the best part of his legacy. His early pieces, up to the mid-1880s, were written in a salon style and lean noticeably on the music of Rameau, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt. Albéniz spoke about his early works without illusions: he thought them naive and childishly simple, yet admitted that it was in them one could hear the colour, sunlight and taste of the olives of his native Spain.
The turn to Spanish material came after he met Felip Pedrell in 1883. In his mature pieces Albéniz combined Spanish folk dances and songs — the jota, seguidilla, sortsico, malagueña — with the techniques of classical music, drew on cante jondo, the deepest and most serious kind of flamenco singing, and on modes unusual in the classical tradition: most often the Phrygian, but also the Aeolian, Mixolydian and whole-tone scales.
Albéniz also took the guitar as a model for the texture of his piano pieces: in Córdoba, for instance, the tart, plucked-sounding accompaniment evokes Moorish guzlas, above which sounds a hauntingly beautiful melody. Yet he never wrote a single note for the guitar himself — his pieces (Asturias, Granada, Sevilla, Córdoba and others) entered that instrument's classical repertoire only through other musicians' transcriptions, among them Francisco Tárrega and Miguel Llobet.
Albéniz's biographer Walter Clark called the cycle Chants d'Espagne (1892) the first blossoming of his distinctive creative gift, a herald of the works of his maturity. Orchestral pieces from the same period include the Spanish Rhapsody (1887) and the suite Catalonia (1899, of which Albéniz completed only the first movement), dedicated to the painter Ramon Casas, who painted a full-length portrait of Albéniz in 1894.
The high point of this line was the late suite Iberia, twelve piano pieces that Albéniz began writing in 1905. Besides piano music, Albéniz also wrote for the stage — zarzuelas and operas such as Pepita Jiménez and Merlin — as well as more than two dozen songs and a handful of orchestral and chamber works.
The site currently features one piece by Albéniz — Rumores de la Caleta (Op. 71), at an upper intermediate level; it is the natural place to start exploring his music at the instrument until more pieces are added.