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.
Composer Paul Dukas once termed Albéniz ‘a Don Quixote with the manner of Sancho Panza’ and his biographer, Walter Aaron Clark, found discrepancies in information that showed the composer was a deeply unreliable narrator of his own existence. He left, for instance, an account of studying with Franz Liszt in Budapest that turned out to be pure fantasy. The genuine side of Albéniz’s irrepressible spirit, however, lives on in his great-hearted music.
Who was Albéniz?
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 on the Mozart level of perfection, cast important light on Albéniz’s creative life.
When was Albéniz born?
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… or so the story went. Another version suggests that Dolores Albéniz took two of her daughters to study in Paris, but Isaac and his other sister, Clementina, stayed at home with their father. Clementina’s account says that Isaac could not read music until he was six or seven, but played purely by ear.
Who did he study with?
Albéniz studied in Madrid with José Mendizábal and composed his first piece in 1869: a Marcha militar for piano. Legend says that he ran away from home, aged 11, on a railway escapade through Spain; but he was probably on a concert tour with his father. Stories about him stowing away on a ship to America also turn out (rather disappointingly) to have little basis: Ángel was appointed as an inspector-general in Havana, Cuba, in 1875, which is why his son went to the Caribbean and performed there. A couple of months at the Leipzig Conservatory followed the next year. After the money ran out, which it rapidly did, he won a scholarship to study in Brussels.
During the 1880s and ’90s, Albéniz composed a string of solo piano works that resemble Spanish travelogues, In works such as Suite española, Recuerdos de viaje, and Cantos de España, he employed the edgy rhythms and characteristic melodic twists of Spanish traditional music to evoke atmospheres, landscapes and cityscapes, especially those of Andalucia.
Ironically, however, Spanish politics disenchanted him so much that he preferred to live elsewhere. From abroad, he preserved in his music a personal, idealised version of his homeland – rather like Chopin with Poland, or Liszt with Hungary.
Was Albéniz married?
In 1883 Albéniz married his piano student Rosina Jordana. They went on to have five children, one of whom, Alfonso, would become the first footballer to play for both FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Where did Albéniz live?
He moved to London in 1890; he had made his name there through a concert tour the previous year, during which he signed a contract with Henry Lowenfeld (an impresario of sorts), placing his work as composer and pianist under Lowenfeld’s control. This enabled the Albéniz family to take up residence in ‘una casa magnifíca’ in the Brompton area. During these years he reached the peak of his powers as a pianist.
He also tried writing English operetta in The Magic Opal, of which George Bernard Shaw commented: ‘His music is pretty, shapely, unstinted, lively, goodnatured, and far too romantic and refined for the stuff which Mr Arthur Law [the librettist] has given him to set.’ Though well received, the stage production foundered on financial problems, which a cut-down version, The Magic Ring, did not solve. After three years the Lowenfeld contract was revised, a third person entering the agreement: Money-Coutts.
In 1894, without losing his patron’s support, Albéniz relocated: first briefly to Barcelona, then to Paris, as his wife, Rosina, preferred that city. This move transformed the nature of his music. He became close friends with the French composers Gabriel Fauré and Ernest Chausson, and was substantially influenced by Debussy.
Links with French Impressionism
He took some lessons, too, with d’Indy and Dukas, the latter notably spicing up his orchestration. The impact of French Impressionism substantially extended his technical and imaginative range, feeding into Ibéria’s 12 pieces and helping to make that cycle into what Olivier Messiaen once called ‘the masterpiece of Spanish music'.
But how does an impossibly talented Spanish pianist land up setting Arthurian opera libretti by an English aristocratic poet? Was it simply for the money? For years the relationship of Albéniz and Money-Coutts was portrayed as a kind of Faustian pact. This was not just unfair, but inaccurate.
Money-Coutts’s patronage enabled Albéniz to support his family while also writing the music he longed to write; it also made possible his move to Paris. He would otherwise have been obliged to devote more time to performing and teaching to earn a crust, and his compositions would have been the casualty. Besides, Money-Coutts was anything but a Mephistopheles. He certainly had inherited wealth, but he was also deeply cultured: a lawyer, a prolific author, the editor of numerous poetry books, and as a poet more than just a Great British Amateur.
There was still more to it, however. According to their descendants – respectively Crispin Money-Coutts, Ninth Baron Latymer, and Alfonso Alzamora – their families have long suspected that composer and librettist were possibly lovers and that their work together sprang from a deep personal attachment. That impression is borne out by some very touching poems that Money-Coutts wrote in memory of Albéniz after his death.
What operas did Albéniz write?
Their joint operas, which began with Henry Clifford, have largely languished in obscurity. Set during the Wars of the Roses, Henry Clifford was premiered in 1895 in Barcelona but, while generally well received, suffered from indifferent performers, a too-brief run late in the opera season and a general prejudice that a pianist could not be capable of writing a strong opera. It vanished for over a century, until reconstructed and recorded in 2002.
More recognition has attended Pepita Jiménez – perhaps because it most readily meets widespread preconceptions about Albéniz’s Spanish style. Based on a novel by Juan Valera, it tells of a wealthy young widow and her love for a man who intends to become a monk. It had a difficult genesis: after the 1896 premiere Albéniz revised it substantially, and the third version in 1905 proved the most successful. Other composers tinkered with it after his death, and not to its advantage; one of them changed the ending, making this tuneful, good-natured piece into a tragedy.
The influence of Wagner
Money-Coutts’s dream, however, was to create a trilogy based on Arthurian legend: Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere. Merlin alone was completed before Albéniz died (he did not live long enough even to begin on Guinevere); and the only part he ever heard performed was the prelude, a shadowy soundscape steeped in the music of Wagner, especially Parsifal – which might not otherwise be credited as a major Albéniz influence, but is frankly unmistakable.
The opera shows a side of its composer of which we would otherwise know too little. It was not staged with orchestra until 1950, and a modern revival in 2003 was seemingly a one-off, but it has been recorded by an all-star cast including Carlos Alvarez and Plácido Domingo. Albéniz also wrote some piano music based on poems by Money-Coutts: he intended to produce a suite entitled The Alhambra, of which the soulful piece ‘La vega’ is a survivor.
What is Albéniz's most famous work?
But it is in his masterpiece Ibéria, composed between 1905 and ’08, that the various elements of Spanish character, pianistic virtuosity and the impact of Impressionism arrive in ideal balance. Here Albéniz, as he wrote (reliably, for once), had taken ‘españolismo [Spanish nationalism] and technical difficulty to the ultimate extreme’. The 12 pieces – four books of three each – do not have to be played together or in order, so perhaps it is no wonder if pianists home in on the Flamenco-laden numbers such as ‘Triana’ and ‘El Albaicín’. Yet it is in the darker, gentler, almost visionary pieces, including ‘Evocación’ and ‘Almería’, that perhaps Albéniz is revealing his inner self: his rooted anguish, his deep, warm tenderness and his generous soul.
When did Albéniz die?
The composer died in 1909, at the age of just 48, in Cambo-les-Bains, France. He had been suffering from Bright’s Disease, an intensely painful kidney inflammation. His death left the musical world mourning a bright-burning, inimitable star.
And where is he buried?
Isaac Albéniz is buried in Montjuïc Cemetery, Barcelona.
What is Albéniz's music like?
Here are some elements you will hear in the music of this great Spanish composer.
Spanish dances
Albéniz’s music often pulsates with the infectious rhythms of the jota or the habanera; but he does not often appropriate folk music intact, instead adopting its characteristic elements to inform original work. The harmonies are full of deliciously harsh clashes, the melodies twinkle with decorative twists and the textures are busy with street life, guitar strumming and the stamp of dancing feet.
Virtuosity
Albéniz’s astonishing pianistic abilities enabled him to realise his richest and most atmospheric ideas on the instrument. His piano music, Ibéria in particular, is extremely challenging to perform, written with many-layered voicing full of inner busyness and garlanded with scintillating effects.
Sweet tooth à la française
Even if opera was not Albéniz’s natural habitat, his embrace of French Romantic sentiment derived from Massenet and Gounod, his unfailing lyricism and his refulgent orchestration give his opera Pepita Jiménez considerable appeal.
Impressionism and introspection
In Paris Albéniz soaked up the language of Debussy, Fauré, Chausson, Dukas and their colleagues: his late works – his ‘second manner’ – were pervaded by the Symbolist introspection so audible in Merlin. A supposedly depressive tendency is sometimes attributed to his years of suffering from nephritis and its psychological effect on this liveliest of men.
Jessica Duchen would like to thank Crispin Money-Coutts, Ninth Baron Latymer, and Alfonso Alzamora for their help with research for this article.
Top pic: Matt Herring
