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With a new opera—
La légende de Rudel
, based
on the life of the Provençal troubadour Jaufre
Rudel—in hand, Castro returned to Mexico in
September 1906. Four months later, the Con-
servatorio Nacional appointed Castro its new
director. His multifaceted career still on the rise,
Castro died of pneumonia on November 28,
1907. Institutions of higher education through-
out Mexico observed three days of mourning in
his honor.
Castro’s piano music, especially the virtuosic
solo and salon pieces, displays a prominent in-
fluence of Liszt, Chopin, Mozart, and the im-
pressionists, as did the work of his contempo-
raries in the “Group of Six”: Gustavo E. Campa,
Juan Hernández Acevedo, Carlos J. Meneses,
Ignacio Quesada, and Felipe Villanueva. His
affinity for compositional forms adopted by
Chopin—barcarolle, étude, mazurka, and po-
lonaise—is quite remarkable and unmatched by
his Mexican colleagues.
MANUEL PONCE (1882–1948)
Piano works
The most influential Mexican musician of his
generation, Manuel María Ponce Cuéllar de-
veloped a fascinatingly diverse career as a pia-
nist, composer, educator, music critic, and ad-
ministrator. Keyboard instruments, both piano
and organ, occupied his early musical training,
and he was considered something of a prodigy.
At age 18, Ponce moved from his hometown of
Aguascalientes toMexico City to further his mu-
sical education. He traveled to Europe in 1904 to
study at the Liceo Musicale in Berlin and, later,
the Stern’sches Konservatorium in Berlin. Ponce
returned to Mexico three years later and joined
the faculty of the Conservatorio Nacional de
Música as a piano and music history instructor.
The Mexican Revolution stirred a sense of na-
tionalism, which Ponce proudly declared in a
1914 lecture: “Our salons welcomed only for-
eign music in 1910, such as Italianate
romanzas
and operatic arias transcribed for piano. Their
doors remained resolutely closed to the
canción
mexicana
until at last the revolutionary cannon
in the north announced the imminent destruc-
tion of the old order. … Nationalism captured
music at last. Old songs, almost forgotten, but
truly reflecting the national spirit, were revived,
and new melodies for new
corridos
were com-
posed … everywhere the idea gained impetus
that the republic should have its own musical
art faithfully mirroring its own soul.” Still, the
political turmoil in Mexico forced Ponce to Ha-
vana, Cuba, where he taught music, wrote music
reviews, and absorbed aspects of Cuban music
(including actual folksongs) into his composi-
tional language between 1915 and 1917.
Ponce resumed his position at the Conservato-
rio Nacional, became conductor of the Orquesta
Sinfónica Nacional, and founded the monthly
journal
Revista musical de México.
From 1925
until 1933, he took an extended sabbatical in Par-
is, where Ponce immersed himself in avant-gar-
de compositional techniques, studied privately
with Paul Dukas, and founded a Spanish-lan-
guage magazine,
Gaceta musical
, covering mu-
sical developments in Latin America. Ponce
returned to Mexico in 1933 to become director
of the Conservatorio Nacional and, one year
later, held a chair in folklore at the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México. He continued
to pursue literary interests with the establish-
ment of another journal,
Cultura musical
. Six
months before his death, the Mexican govern-
ment awarded Ponce its National Prize for Arts
and Sciences.
Combining Romantic keyboard forms, indig-
enous folksong, and modernist techniques,
Ponce’s compositions established a high mark
for Mexican music. Though he wrote in most
major forms, Ponce is best known for his guitar
and piano compositions, arguably the most fa-
miliar being
Estrellita (Metamorfósis de concier-
to
). His extensive catalogue of more than 100
keyboard compositions ranges from a collec-
tion of 20 mazurkas to Mexican and other Latin
dances to modernist and impressionist works.
ISAAC ALBÉNIZ (1860–1909)
Mallorca (Barcarola)
, op. 202
Two selections from
Suite española
, op. 47
Spanish pianist and composer Isaac Albéniz was
a child prodigy who made his public recital de-
but at age 4. He applied for admission to the Par-
is Conservatory in 1867, but was refused admis-
sion, despite his phenomenal playing, because
he was too young. According to some accounts,
he broke a mirror throwing a ball around after
his audition. A restless spirit, Albéniz ran away
from home, traveling abroad (against his fa-
ther’s wishes) to North and South America be-
fore he was 13, as well as to the British Isles and
throughout central Europe. On one such trip in
1880, he reportedly studied with Franz Liszt. Al-
béniz abandoned his performing career in 1890
to focus on composition. He wrote in many dif-
ferent genres, but it was piano music that earned
him greatest recognition. Albéniz spent the fi-
nal year of his life in France, where his wife and
three children were born.
Albéniz prided himself in his Andalusian heri-
tage, even exaggerating these cultural origins by
declaring himself a Moor and most at home at
the Moorish palace, the Alhambra. Evocations
of Andalusian music surface throughout his
oeuvre, but particularly in his nationalistic pi-
ano collections, such as the two
Suites españo-
las,
the
12 piezas características
, and his popular
Suite Iberia
. In these, Albéniz portrayed the folk
spirit of various locales in Andalusia. His pianis-
tic style owed much to textures and figurations
in the native guitar tradition, and many of his
keyboard compositions have been transcribed
for guitar.
Mallorca
, op. 202, is one such work.
Inspired by a visit to the Balearic island of Mal-
lorca off the eastern coast of Spain in May 1890,
Mallorca
was first performed in London on Al-
béniz’s recital on November 7 that same year.
The composer dedicated the score to Miss Ellie
Lowenfeld, the daughter of the Polish-born Brit-
ish impresario Henry Lowenfeld. The London
publisher Stanley Lucas, Weber & Co. issued the
first edition in 1891.
–Program notes © 2018 Todd E. Sullivan
Manuel Ponce
Isaac Albéniz
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