Composed 1897; 16 minutes

La Vega (The Plain) is a musical reflection of the view over the plain of Granada seen from The Alhambra, the magnificent Islamic palace and fortress located in Granada, in the southernmost Andalusia region of Spain. Spanish virtuoso pianist-composer Isaac Albéniz wrote the piece in Paris where he was living after a successful career, touring extensively throughout Europe and the Spanish Americas from an early age, with a facility for turning out reams of salon music. He had lived several years in London where he wrote operas and signed an agreement with an English banker, which left him comfortably off for the rest of his life. In Paris, Albéniz would set his sights higher than the picture-postcard album leaf, and his ambitions were to be fully realized two decades later in the four volumes of Iberia, a major landmark in Spanish music. 

La Vega was initially written as a piano piece in 1897, although Albéniz had it in mind as the first of a six-part orchestral suite to be titled The Alhambra. Only a fragment of one of the other pieces was sketched and La Vega was eventually published in 1908, after Iberia was published. “What I have composed is the entire plain of Granada, contemplated from the Alhambra,” Albéniz wrote to a friend.