From the death of the composer Tomás Luis de Victoria at the beginning of the 17th century until the early years of the 20th century, Spanish art music slumbered. Although the country's folk music attracted major composers from other European countries, Spanish musicians seemed to think of themselves as an adjunct to Italian or other musical cultures. (For that matter, even Victoria had studied in Italy.) But nearly 100 years ago, three Spanish musicians - Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla - began to reverse the long trend. Among them, Falla demonstrated the greatest musical versatility and durability.

Falla's early musical studies were carried out in Cádiz - where he was born - but in his early 20s he moved to Madrid to complete his training at the capital's conservatory. For a while, to make ends meet, he wrote "zarzuelas" (Spanish operettas), but his first fully mature work is generally considered to be the opera La vida breve, which dates from 1904-05 (although it was not performed until 1913). His development was given a decisive push by a long sojourn (1907-14) in Paris, which was to become a second home for him; there he met and was influenced by Debussy, Ravel, and his fellow expatriate Albéniz. But with the exception of Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain), for piano and orchestra, most of the works by which Falla is remembered were written after his return to Spain. The long list includes the ballets El amor brujo (Love, the Magician) and El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, which was commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and first performed in its final, revised version by that ensemble in London in 1919); the puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Pedro's Puppet Show), based on an episode from Don Quixote (commissioned by the Princess de Polignac and performed at her palace in Paris in June 1923 - Falla had conducted the first concert performances three months before, in Seville, and the first public puppet performance took place in London in 1924, conducted by Malcolm Sargent); the Concerto for Harpsichord and five instruments (written for the great harpsichord virtuoso Wanda Landowska and first performed by her in Barcelona in 1926, with Falla conducting); and a variety of other stage works and orchestral, vocal, chamber and piano music.

In 1920 Falla moved from Madrid back to his native Andalusia - not to Cádiz, however, but to Granada, where he was in frequent contact with the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and other local artists and literati. From 1926 to the end of his life, he was much preoccupied by the composition of Atlántida, a grandiose oratorio based on the poem of the same name by the 19th-century Catalan writer Jacinto Verdaguer. Falla's health, which had never been good, began to deteriorate seriously in the late 1920s, and it was not improved by his awareness of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936. He was especially affected by the murder of Lorca (on whose behalf he had tried, too late, to intervene with the civil authorities) and the atrocities committed by Franco's falangist forces in the name of the Catholic Church: Falla was extremely devout. In 1939 he sailed for Argentina, where he eventually settled in Alta Gracia, in the province of Córdoba. There he died of a heart attack, nine days before his 70th birthday. Atlántida was eventually completed by another Spanish composer, Ernesto Halffter.

The English Falla expert Ronald Crichton has written: "It is possible that the mainspring of Falla's genius lay in the tension between the monk-like, frugal, celibate side of his nature and the other side which could capture the alteration of physical joy and despair in popular music and paint in sound feminine portraits as complete and distinct as Salud in La vida breve, Candelas in El amor brujo, the Miller's Wife in El sombrero de tres picos". Falla himself wrote, in 1917, that "music is not, and should not, be made to be understood, rather it is made to be experienced."

Harvey Sachs

Biographical notes (c) 1996, by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg

A selection of major works:

Orchestral: Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments, Homenajes, Noches en los jardines de España (piano and orchestra)

Chamber: Suite populaire espagnole (violin and piano)

Instrumental solo: El amor brujo (piano transcription), Fantasía bética (piano), Homenaje "Pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas" (piano), Homenaje "Le tombeau de Claude Debussy" (guitar), 4 Pièces espagnoles (piano), El sombrero de tres picos (piano transcription), Vals-capricho (piano)

Vocal/Choral: 7 Canciones populares españolas, 3 Mélodies, Psyché

Stage works: Ballets: El amor brujo, El sombrero de tres picos
Operas: El Retablo de maese Pedro (puppet opera), La vida breve
Other: Atlántida (scenic cantata)