After an apparently more sedate audition, he was accepted at the Madrid Conservatory and received his first serious instruction in the piano and theory. By the ripe old age of nine, however, he had grown disenchanted with Madrid and found passage to Havana where he proved to be something of a sensation playing piano at several of that city's wild night spots. On the promise of receiving the finest piano instruction available in Europe, his father coaxed young Isaac, now twelve, back to the continent. After a time in Leipzig and The Conservatory in Brussels, Isaac finally achieved adulthood and with it a remarkable virtuosity on the keyboard, skills honed by teachers the likes of Reinecke and Liszt.
The years 1880 to 1892 were a whirlwind of concert recitals, touring both the United States and Europe. And it was also during this time that he began to compose. While his output included some opera, his compositions were almost exclusively for the piano. They tended to be immature little show pieces, often devilishly difficult, written with his own ferocious technique in mind.
Along with critical acclaim for his playing ability, Albniz was also gaining a reputation for his laissez-faire attitudes toward money. He gave or lent to anyone who asked and on one occasion sold the copyright for his piano work Pavana outright in exchange for a bullfight ticket. His response to those who questioned his suspect money management was that he could always compose another piece if he needed funds.
A move to Paris in 1893 was to prove most significant. Isaac was now married (with a trio of children) and with his family he was content with a much less frivolous life-style. Equally significant, he was soon caught up in the impressionistic trends of new found friends Debussy, Chausson, Faur and Dukas. He also fell under the influence of noted Spanish musicologist Felipe Pedrell. It was Pedrell's dream that there emerge a new Spanish music inspired by authentic folk elements and Albniz took up the challenge. Slowly he began to demonstrate a more mature compositional style, fusing musical material from his native land into the creation of watercolor portraits of ever increasing breadth and complexity.
It was during the years of 1906 and 1909 that Albniz penned his greatest work, Iberia. Its full title includes the description 12 nouvelles "impressions" en quatre cahiers ( 12 new "Impressions" in Four Books). This work, more than all of his others, has assured the composer his place among that greatest in Western music. These impressions are in fact beautifully detailed landscapes and scenes from around Spain, each bearing a geographical subtitle. Through the clever use of authentic Spanish melody, subtle rhythm, novel harmony, and his ever-present complex technical demands, Albniz transports the listener from exotic sea port to sunny hill side; from crowded festival street to lonely tavern. All together, Iberia is a sensuous travelogue which truly pays homage to Pedrell's dream. It has also proven an inspiration to later Spanish composers like Granados, Turina and Manuel de Falla.
Albeniz is remembered as much for his free spirited lifestyle as he is for his musical contributions. His early years of reckless living left their mark on his health and during the period of the writing of Iberia he grew increasingly ill, dying of Bright's disease in 1909 a few days short of his 49th birthday. It is all the more remarkable that such bright music should show forth from a man whose misery increased with each passing year.
On this issue of Nautilus we feature Book 1 from Iberia, dedicated to Madame Ernest Chausson. The three "Impressions" contained in Book 1 are entitled:
1. Evocaciùn (Evocation)
2. El Puerto (El Puerto)
3. El Corpus en Sevilla (Corpus Christi in Seville)
The third selection is the most famous and depicts an annual religious ceremony held in the streets of Seville. It has been transcribed for orchestra by Leopold Stokowski.
[Ed. Note - One fact of interest to MIDI musicians is the challenge presented by Albniz use of dynamic extremes. This author usually confines the range of dynamics (pp to ff ) to the MIDI key-velocity values of 40 to 88. Mr. Albniz, in his Iberia, utilizes dynamic markings from ppppp to fffff. This not only gets us into unaccustomed key-velocities but makes the generation of our regularly featured digitized performances much more difficult since the very soft passages end up muddled down on the Mac Sound Manager's 8-bit resolution noise floor. We apologize for these deficiencies and hope that you will enjoy using the MIDI files directly in your own sequencer set-up.]
