Though best known for depicting the colours of his homeland, the Spaniard was in fact a truly cosmopolitan figure, says Jessica Duchen
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Perhaps the story of Isaac Albéniz is not the most colourful, unlikely or fascinating of any composer’s life. But it can’t be far off, especially as accounts of it have often been liberally peppered with self-created disinformation. Paul Dukas once termed him ‘a Don Quixote with the manner of Sancho Panza’ and his biographer, Walter Aaron Clark, found discrepancies in information that showed he was a deeply unreliable narrator of his own existence. For instance, his account of studying with Liszt in Budapest turned out to be pure fantasy. The genuine side of Albéniz’s irrepressible spirit, however, lives on in his great-hearted music.
Along with his compatriots Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla, Albéniz’s importance is bound up with the musical nationalism of the late-19th and early-20th centuries: his work is inextricably connected to his native Spain, its traditional music and its folklore. In person, though, he was thoroughly cosmopolitan, resident mainly in Paris, but influenced – indeed facilitated – by his association with London.
He is best known for his piano works, in particular the vertigo-inducing heights of the cycle Ibéria, one of the most technically challenging creations in the repertoire. Once, he nearly destroyed its manuscript for fear that it was impossible to play. Yet this magnificent work might never have existed were it not for Albéniz’s London patron, Francis Money-Coutts, Fifth Baron Latymer, who guaranteed him a pension for life in return for setting his libretti to music. So bizarre has the friendship of Spanish musician and English lord seemed to commentators that its crucial role has rarely gained enough credit. Not least, three complete operas resulted which, even if not quite Mozartian perfection, cast important light on Albéniz’s creative life.
Enough myths and mysteries surrounded Albéniz even before that. What is certain, however, is that he was born on 29 May 1860 in the small Catalonian town of Camprodón, Lérida, close to the French border. His father, Ángel, was a customs officer, a sometime would-be local politician and a passionate Freemason. Isaac was a child prodigy: he made his first concert appearance aged four at Barcelona’s Teatro Romea. When he was seven, his mother took him to play to Antoine Marmontel at the Paris Conservatoire, but the lad was thought too young for the institution
