Isaac Albéniz

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Isaac Albéniz 1901
Albéniz , by Ramon Casas ( MNAC ).

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz (born May 29, 1860 in Camprodon , Girona , † May 18, 1909 in Cambo-les-Bains , Pyrénées-Atlantiques , France ) was a Spanish composer and pianist .

Life

The tax administrator Angel Albéniz and his wife Dolores Pascual were his parents. On June 3, 1860, Isaac Albéniz was baptized as Isaac Manuel Francisco. His sister gave him first piano lessons at the age of one. He began his career as a child prodigy at the piano with the first public concert in which he improvised at the age of four. At the age of six he was to continue his piano studies at the Paris Conservatory with Antoine François Marmontel . Although he would have been recorded from a musical standpoint, his training was suspended for immaturity after he smashed a window with a ball. He returned to Spain and performed continuously for the next three years. His parents presented him disguised as a musketeer with a rapier on his side. He performed various tricks on the piano, such as blindfolded, crossed arms, sitting with his back to the piano, or playing with the top of his fingers. When Albéniz was eight years old, his family moved to Madrid so that he could attend the local conservatory. He soon ran away from home, initially within Spain, and financed himself through spontaneous concerts.

Finally, at the age of twelve, he fled as a stowaway on a ship to America with destination Puerto Rico . He tried to pay for the crossing with his piano, but despite donations from fellow passengers, he had to disembark in Buenos Aires . Here he experienced hunger and misery, until a Spanish compatriot discovered him playing the piano in a café. This enabled him to tour South America. From then on it went up. When he went to Havana in the Spanish colony of Cuba a year later , he was already traveling with a small fortune of 10,000 francs. At a concert in Santiago, however, he was arrested by the police and taken to his father in Havana. This was there as a civil servant. He allowed his son to continue his tour that took him next to New York. Thanks to his vaudeville tricks he had a certain success, which led him to San Francisco in 1874, his last stop in America.

After returning to Europe in Liverpool , he came to Leipzig via London . Here he wanted to perfect his technique at the conservatory. He initially studied composition with Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn for nine months . Lack of money forced him back to Spain. Here he initially wanted to continue his studies, but his thirst for adventure led him back to America as a piano accompanist. Back in Spain he met the Spanish aristocrat and composer Guillermo Morphy (1836–1899). This presented him to King Alfonso XII. before who granted him a pension. This enabled Albéniz to study in Brussels, where he met the Spanish violinist Enrique Fernández Arbós . Albéniz lived in the household run by Arbó's mother. The two young musicians became close friends. They made music together, and Arbos made the main works of the pianist known through his orchestrations. Albéniz got into bad company and neglected his studies. Together with a South American he had met in Brussels, he came up with the idea of ​​squandering all her money and ultimately committing suicide. After learning about it, Arbos and other friends were able to save him from it. Albéniz himself became aware of the gravity of the situation when the body of the South American was found in the Bois de Cambre after he had shot himself.

From then on he went back to his studies with the necessary seriousness and conscientiously prepared himself for the upcoming exams, which he completed with a First Prize. Now they parted ways. While Arbos went to Joseph Joachim in Berlin, Albéniz decided to perfect his piano playing with Franz Liszt . Albéniz was so taken with Albéniz's piano playing that Albéniz continued his studies with Liszt. He is said to have been with Liszt in Weimar and accompanied him to Rome. In 1880 Albéniz set out again on a concert tour to America. This took him to Cuba, Mexico, Argentina and finally back to Spain. His repertoire at this time consisted of works by Bach and Handel , Haydn , Mozart and Beethoven , Schubert , Schumann , Weber and Mendelssohn , but also of older music, for example by Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin . Also works by Chopin , Moscheles , Ries, Dussek, Rubinstein, Heller, Grieg , Mayer, Liszt and Brassin . Regarding Spanish music, he played two caprices from his patron Morphy, a funeral march from Bretón and about fifty compositions of his own. The first composition to be printed was a Marche héroïque by the publisher Romero, which he overwhelmed with compositions, especially salon music, in this phase until 1883.

Albéniz lived in Barcelona from 1883 to 1885 . Here was a turning point in his work. His composition teacher Felip Pedrell induced him to compose in the national Spanish style. In 1883 he married Rosina Jordana, one of his students from a French-Pyrenean musical family. He had three children with her. His son Alfonso was born in 1885, his daughters Enriqueta in 1889 and Laura in 1890. Laura, a talented painter, he often accompanied the dance with the piano. Since she learned many languages, she handled his correspondence and became his secretary. He lost his entire fortune in speculation on the stock market and had to flee to the Pyrenees. His concert activities brought him back on his feet, but avoided Barcelona and went back to Madrid. Here he gave many concerts and was called "Spanish Ruby Stone". His reputation preceded him to Paris and London. In 1889 he got an engagement with the piano maker Érard. A concert tour then took him to London and several English cities. In 1893 he gave concerts in London, Brussels and Berlin. After a long stay in London, he finally settled permanently in Paris at the request of his wife. Albéniz knew how to process the rhythms of Spanish and Andalusian folk music in his piano works. Albéniz is considered to be the founder of the Spanish national style, which combines folkloric elements with a virtuoso piano setting, but which sometimes also tends towards the salon-like genre.

In 1893 he returned to Spain, then went to Paris in 1902 and stayed in France until his death. In Paris he completed his composition studies with Vincent d'Indy and Paul Dukas . Here he matured into a finished composer and finally found his own style.

Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz , former wife of the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy , is a great-granddaughter of Isaac Albéniz.

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Piano works until 1904

By 1904 Albéniz composed hundreds of salon pieces for piano, some of them "technically simple, ... moderately virtuoso, of modest intellectual rank" . Many of these piano compositions (including Asturias and Granada from op. 47 and Torre bermeja and Zambra granadina from op. 92) were soon transcribed for the guitar by well-known guitarists and interpreted in a pioneering way by Julian Bream, for example . The harmonic and rhythmic peculiarities, the sound and the color of Spanish music were more clearly expressed than in the piano version. Above all, the timbre of the guitar marks the source of musical inspiration in the style of the composer. Albéniz himself is said to have preferred Francisco Tárrega's guitar transcriptions to the originals. Albéniz's music was also preferred to be played or heard on the guitar because it was believed that this music seemed “tailored to the body” of this instrument and because the listener tended to listen to the Spanish dances, even if they were played on the piano believed hearing a guitar.

Orchestral works Romantic themes.pdf
Orchestral works Romantic themes.pdf
Orchestral works Romantic themes.pdf
Orchestral works Romantic themes.pdf
Orchestral works Romantic themes.pdf

Iberia

Albéniz secured fame with the extensive piano cycle Iberia (1905-08). This suite consists of four “volumes” of three pieces each, which require the greatest pianistic virtuosity and are generally regarded as the masterpiece of Albéniz. “Nothing in Albéniz's earlier work would have suggested music of such complexity, muscularity and difficulty” ( Harold C. Schonberg ). The French pianist Blanche Selva (1884–1943), to whom the second volume is dedicated, initially considered the work to be unplayable, but nevertheless played all 12 pieces in the first performance. Albéniz wrote to the Catalan pianist Joaquin Malats (1872–1912) in 1907: "I write Iberia ... mainly because of you and for you" . The Navarra finally completed by Déodat de Séverac was originally planned for the fourth volume; But Albéniz thought it was “outrageously cheap” and instead composed Jerez . A successful and frequently played today Orchestral Suite 5 Iberia - transcriptions ( Evocación, Fête Dieu à Séville, Triana, El Puerto, El Albaicín ) created the Spanish conductor and composer Enrique Fernández Arbós . Ravel , too , had started transcribing 6 Iberia pieces with Rondeña on behalf of Ida Rubinstein in 1928 , but then discovered that the exclusive transcription rights had been granted to Arbós and that Arbós had already edited 5 pieces. When Arbós found out about it, he renounced this exclusive right; Ravel, however, had already turned to the composition of the Boléro and made no more use of Arbó's concession. The remaining Iberia pieces were transcribed by the Spanish composer Carlos Surinach in the 1950s on behalf of the heirs of Albéniz. El Corpus Christi en Sevilla also arranged Leopold Stokowski as well as a complete orchestral transcription from Iberia around the turn of the millennium by the Slovak composer Peter Breiner. Claude Debussy said of the last piece from Iberia , Eritaña : “Music has never achieved such diverse, so colorful impressions; the eyes close, as if blinded by looking at too many pictures. ” Jacinto Torres published a facsimile of this important piano work (Mainz 2001, Schott).

Famous works

As more well-known works by Albéniz, the following should be emphasized. All works are original for piano solo.

  • Suite española op. 47 from 1886: consists of 8 pieces that pay homage to well-known regions and cities of his home country: Granada , Cataluña , Seville , Cádiz , Asturias , Aragón , Castilla and Cuba
  • Cantos de España op.232: Preludio Leyenda (identical to op.47 , no.5 : Asturias ), Oriental , Bajo la palmera , Córdoba , Seguidillas (identical to op.47 , no.7 : Castilla (Seguidillas) )
  • Recuerdos de Viaje op.71 : En el mar , Leyenda , Alborada , En la Alhambra , Puerta de Tierra , Rumores de la Caleta , ( Malagueña ) , En la playa
  • Suite España op.165 : Preludio , Tango , Malagueña , Capricho , Serenata , Zortzico
  • Doce piezas características op. 92
  • Mallorca op.202
  • Iberia :
  • Navarra or op.
  • Tango op.164, No. 2

The three operas, on the other hand, are rarely performed:

  • Merlin - Opera in 3 acts
  • Henry Clifford - Opera in 3 acts
  • Pepita Jiménez - Lyric Comedy in 2 acts

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  1. ↑ a b c d e Edgar Istel, Frederick H. Martens: Isaac Albéniz . In: The Musical Quarterly . tape 15 , no. 1 , 1929, ISSN  0027-4631 , p. 117-148 , JSTOR : 738310 (English).
  2. ^ Harold Schonberg: The Great Pianists, New York 1987, p. 362
  3. ^ Georgii : Piano Music, Zurich 1984, p. 458, via the suite española ; similar to Reclam's piano music guide (Stuttgart 1973): “España, op 165 ..., then travel memories [op 71], sounds from Spain [op 232] and the eight-movement suite española [op 47] are, with a few exceptions, dance characters of modest structure. "
  4. ^ Hannes Fricke: Myth guitar: history, interpreters, great hours. Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-020279-1 , p. 201.
  5. ↑ Schonberg ibid
  6. ↑ Schonberg ibid
  7. ↑ Orenstein: Ravel: Man and Musician, New York 1991, p. 98
  8. ↑ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801E4DD1238F936A25752C1A961958260
  9. ↑ Cuba was under Spanish rule until 1898.

Web links

Commons : Isaac Albéniz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Albéniz, Isaac
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Albéniz, Isaac Manuel Francisco (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish composer and pianist
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Camprodon , Girona
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1909
Place of death Cambo-les-Bains , Pyrénées-Atlantiques department , France