Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) was the prodigy who ran away and the wanderer who found Spain by leaving it. Born in Camprodón in Catalonia, he played in public in Barcelona at four, passed the piano entrance examination for the Paris Conservatoire at seven only to be refused as too young, and at nine was touring northern Spain with his sister under their father's management. The famous story of the boy stowing away on a ship to Buenos Aires in 1872 and making his way through Cuba to the United States is disputed by some, who believe he travelled with his customs-official father; either way the restlessness was real. He studied in Leipzig and Brussels, sought out Liszt, and matured into a pianist of the first rank and one of the leading post-Romantic composers, whose evocations of Andalusia — above all the suite Iberia — reshaped Spanish music and left their mark on Debussy and Ravel. His first published piece, Marcha Militar, appeared in 1868, and the decisive encounter came in 1883 with Felip Pedrell, who urged him towards a specifically Spanish idiom; the Suite española, Op. 47, followed. The search for Liszt took him as far as Budapest but came to nothing, and from 1893 he was settled in Paris.