(Born May 29, 1860, in Camprodón, Spain; died May 18, l909, in Cambô‑les‑Bains, France)

Isaac Albéniz was born in Catalonia, the son of a local government official. He revealed his extraordinary talent when he was only four years old. At six, he went to Paris with his mother, and there he studied with a distinguished teacher, but a childish prank prevented him from entering the Conservatory. As a mere boy, he ran away from home and earned a fortune as a pianist in Latin America, but he ended up penniless in New York, playing in waterfront bars until he pulled himself together for a concert tour that took him as far as San Francisco. He made enough money to get to England and Germany, where he studied with the best academics of the time. He then received a grant from the King of Spain which allowed him to go to the Brussels Conservatory. Later, he also studied privately with Franz Liszt in Germany and Italy.

All this eventful history took place in his first twenty years. After that, Albéniz began a great career as a serious pianist, but little by little, he withdrew from the life of a traveling virtuoso, and in 1893, settled in France, where he became a friend of Chausson, Dukas, Fauré and d'Indy, and devoted himself more and more to composition.

His masterpiece is a collection of twelve musical impressions published between 1906 and 1909 under the title Iberia. These are twelve huge and fiercely difficult piano pieces that capture the sounds, the flavors, and the sights of Spain as no music ever had before. Albéniz was from Catalonia, the musical styles he used here were almost entirely those of Andalusia, an area of southern Spain. Iberia was not intended to be a suite in the sense of a continuous and organized whole made up of related parts, but an anthology of independent pieces. Its total effect is one of enormous musical variety and of formidable eloquence of expression, achieved within the limits of a restricted musical language. Albéniz found inspiration for Iberia in other sources too: he admired the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt and atmospheric French impressionism.

Triana, from Book II, is a musical depiction of the Gypsy neighborhood of that name in Seville, where one could hear a paso doble and a toreadors' march. Triana is a very complex piece, extremely demanding because of its intricacies and intertwining lines.

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As a child, the Catalonian composer/pianist Isaac Albéniz was taken to Paris to study music, but he ran away from home, going as a stowaway to Argentina at the age of twelve. From there, he traveled to Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and all the way across the United States to San Francisco. As a young adult, he made and lost a fortune playing piano in Latin America, ending up playing in New York waterfront bars, earning enough to go to England and finally to Germany, where he Studying with Liszt in Leipzig, Isaac Albéniz met Spanish composer and musicologist Felipe Pedrell, who encouraged him to delve into the musical resources of Spanish music; consequently, Albéniz became instrumental in the creation of a truly national music, incorporating Spanish rhythms and melodies into his music. After he finished studying, he settled in France and became friends with the composers Chausson, Dukas, Fauré, and d'Indy. Actively promoting Spanish music, he participated in the modernismo movement of the resurgence of Catalan culture, which began in Barcelona in the 1890's.

Albéniz's greatest masterpiece is the large piano cycle Iberia, published between 1906 and 1909, which depicts the regions of Spain. The grandeur of the twelve huge piano pieces long overshadowed the charming but more modest works he wrote earlier, which include the Suite Española (1886) in which each movement evokes the place whose name it bears. All eight movements of the Suite are written in triple meter, and all but the second piece, Cataluña, have ternary (three-part) form made up of two similar outer sections and a contrasting middle, a copla, originally an improvised song section placed within a dance.

In 1911, two years after the composer's death, the German publisher Friedrich Hofmeister published the first “complete” version of the Suite española, Op. 47. When it appeared in 1886, the work had been advertised as an eight-movement suite, but only four of its movements were published then. The four additional movements, which are in the complete 1911 edition, had all been published previously under different titles. Commentators suggest that Hofmeister inserted these four movements into the Suite española, changing the names to fit those originally advertised 25 years earlier. Albéniz had, it appears, promised his first publisher more movements than he completed. Thus, for example, a piece known as “Preludio” became Asturias,

subtitled Leyenda, the fifth movement of Albéniz's Suite española. Union Musical Española also published a “complete” version of the Suite española in 1918 edited by Juan Salvat, based on an earlier version rather than on the revised eight-movement Hofmeister version. All subsequent editions of the piece, however, seem to have followed from the altered Hofmeister edition.

Seville is a southern Andalusian city, brought to life in the third movement with the rhythms used in the flamenco style dance called Sevillanas, a lively, festive local dance and song, interrupted by a slower song with a recitative-like melody appearing in octaves. The flamenco rhythm is the foundation beneath the lyrical and sinuous melody in the main sections. Sevillanas has come to be associated with Seville's famous spring feria, still celebrated every year two weeks after Easter.