1876–1946 · Spain
Manuel de Falla (1876–1946) was a Spanish composer from Cádiz. He studied in Madrid, lived for several years in Paris, then in Granada, and from 1939 in Argentina. He wrote the ballets El amor brujo and The Three-Cornered Hat and the cycle Siete canciones populares españolas, some of whose numbers are in our catalogue.
Manuel de Falla was born in Cádiz on 23 November 1876 into a well-off merchant family. His mother, a pianist, gave him his first music lessons. As a child he was also taught lullabies and folk songs by his nurse, known as La Morilla; they stirred the boy's imagination and left a deep mark on him.
When the boy was nine, his mother decided that he should study more seriously and sent him to Eloísa Galluzo, a piano teacher she knew, whose methods were very strict. Later he studied solfège and harmony with Alejandro Odero, and harmony and counterpoint with Enrique Broca. In the evenings Falla attended the chamber-music gatherings at the house of a family friend, Salvador Viniegra, and could use his large music library. His first public performance was with his mother: in the church of San Francisco they played a piano version of Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross.
As a young man Falla was drawn to literature and journalism, and he set up two literary magazines of his own, El Burlón and El Cascabel. In 1893 he heard the music of Grieg at a concert in Cádiz and decided to become a composer. His first pieces, including some for chamber ensemble, were written in 1890–1896, and between 1897 and 1904 he produced a number of piano pieces and five zarzuelas.
In Madrid Falla entered the conservatoire. His piano teacher was José Tragó; he also took harmony and counterpoint. In 1899 he was unanimously awarded first prize for piano. From that same year he began to write his surname with the particle "de", and he has been known as Manuel de Falla ever since.
Falla's early output consists of piano pieces and chamber music. In 1897 he wrote Melodía for cello and piano; its dedicatee was Salvador Viniegra, whose chamber-music evenings he attended; in 1899, at Viniegra's house, the first performances were given of this piece, Romanza, Serenata andaluza and others. In 1900 he gave the Madrid Ateneo the first performance of Serenata andaluza and Vals-Capricho. Since his family was in financial difficulty, it moved in with him, and the income from his piano lessons kept them going.
In Madrid Falla met Felipe Pedrell, one of the key figures of the Spanish cultural revival. Pedrell became his main teacher, instilled in him a love of folk music, flamenco among it, and awakened his interest in cante jondo.
The only one of his zarzuelas to reach the stage, Los amores de la Inés, was shown at the Teatro Cómico in Madrid on 12 April 1902 and ran for twenty performances. That year Falla also got to know the composer Joaquín Turina, and the Society of Authors published his Vals-Capricho and Serenata andaluza.
The opera La vida breve (The Brief Life), written in 1905 to words by Carlos Fernández Shaw, became his first significant work. The San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts gave Falla its first prize for it in a composition contest. A staging at the Teatro Real in Madrid had been promised to the winner but never materialised; the work was first performed in Nice on 1 April 1913, in the municipal casino, with the libretto in French translation. Also in 1905, Falla took first prize in a piano contest backed by the firm Ortiz y Cussó.
In 1907 Falla moved to Paris and stayed there until 1914. Among his acquaintances there were Ravel, Debussy, Picasso, Paul Dukas and Albéniz, as well as Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev. He was influenced by musical Impressionism.
In 1908 Alfonso XIII awarded Falla a royal grant, which kept him in Paris long enough to complete the Cuatro piezas españolas, dedicated to Isaac Albéniz. In 1911–12 he went on concert trips to London, Brussels and Milan and also scouted possible places to stage La vida breve. A second production of the opera was given the year after the premiere, at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
By the middle of 1914 Falla had finished Siete canciones populares españolas. Soon afterwards the First World War began, and he had to return to Madrid; his mature creative period started at that point.
Madrid is where several of his best-known works were written: the ballet with singing El amor brujo, Noches en los jardines de España, a suite for piano and orchestra, and El corregidor y la molinera, reworked afterwards as El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat). Diaghilev staged the latter, with Picasso designing the scenery and costumes, and its plot goes back to a novel by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón.
Falla then settled in Granada, where he grew close to Lorca and people from his circle. In 1922 he and Lorca organised the Cante Jondo festival in Granada, which had a great public and cultural impact. In 1926 his name was given to the theatre in his native city.
In Granada he wrote El retablo de maese Pedro, a puppet opera (1923; its story is taken from a chapter of Don Quixote), and a concerto for harpsichord with an instrumental ensemble. Falla had Wanda Landowska in mind for both pieces. Spanish folk colour is paler in both, while a neoclassicism of Stravinsky's sort comes to the fore. He also started Atlántida here, a large work based on a poem by Jacint Verdaguer, written in Catalan.
After the Republic fell, Falla made Argentina his home from 1939. There he kept working on Atlántida, and in November 1939 Buenos Aires heard the first performance of his suite Homenajes. Franco's government held out the prospect of a generous pension should he come back to Spain; Falla turned it down. In 1940 he was awarded the Alfonso X the Wise order's Grand Cross.
In exile Falla did some teaching, and one of his pupils was the composer Rosa García Ascot. As his health failed he moved to a mountain house, where his sister María del Carmen looked after him. He died of cardiac arrest in Alta Gracia, in Argentina's Córdoba province, on 14 November 1946. Atlántida was left unfinished; the orchestration was completed after his death by his pupil Ernesto Halffter.
In 1947 his remains were returned to Spain and interred in the crypt of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Cádiz. He remained unmarried and childless. The villa above Granada where he lived survives as a museum, and during the 1970s a concert hall named for him, the Auditorio Manuel de Falla, rose on the adjoining site.
Falla's legacy consists of orchestral, chamber and instrumental works, together with songs and romances, some of them to verse by Góngora, Gautier, Bécquer and Lorca. He started out with piano pieces and chamber music and then turned to the zarzuela; he worked with Amadeo Vives on several of them, though only fragments survive. The influence of flamenco, and above all of cante jondo, can be heard in many of his works; it was Pedrell who awakened his interest in it in Madrid.
Among the early piano pieces, Nocturno, Canción, Serenata andaluza and Vals-Capricho deserve a mention. Later Falla composed and played Allegro de concierto for a conservatoire contest; Enrique Granados won with a piece of the same name, yet the Society of Authors went on to publish Falla's Tus ojillos negros and Nocturno.
His best-known works are the opera La vida breve; the ballets El amor brujo (which contains the Danza ritual del fuego, often played on its own and in arrangements) and The Three-Cornered Hat; Noches en los jardines de España, a work for piano with orchestra; the Cuatro piezas españolas, which Falla dedicated to Albéniz; and the Fantasía Bética for piano. Later came El retablo de maese Pedro, the concerto for harpsichord and ensemble, and Psyché for voice, flute, harp and string trio.
In his later works Falla leaned less on Spanish folk music and moved closer to a neoclassicism that brings him near to Stravinsky; this can be heard in El retablo de maese Pedro and in the harpsichord concerto.
His last work was Atlántida, a large piece for soloists, chorus and orchestra based on a poem by Jacint Verdaguer. Falla began it in 1927 and never finished it; his pupil Ernesto Halffter completed the orchestration, and the work was published after the composer's death. Falla presented the harpsichord concerto together with Wanda Landowska and the Pau Casals orchestra. He had a strong influence on the Group of Eight and the Generation of '27. The Manuel de Falla Archive, opened in Granada in 1991, holds photographs, letters, scores, manuscripts and other documents of the composer.
Our site has individual numbers from the cycle Siete canciones populares españolas (1914) for voice and piano: El paño moruno, Seguidilla murciana, Asturiana, Nana, Canción and Polo. There is also an edition of the whole cycle for voice and guitar. All of this music is marked at the level "Intermediate+" on the site. For a pianist it is a chance to meet Spanish folk song as arranged by a major composer; here the piano part accompanies the voice.