Pablo de Sarasate

Purity of intonation rather than force was what contemporaries remembered in Pablo de Sarasate. Born in Pamplona in 1844 as Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascués, he took his first lessons from his father, a military bandmaster, played in public as a child and, supported by Queen Isabella II, studied in Madrid and then at the Paris Conservatoire with Jean-Delphin Alard, where he won the premier prix. Listeners described passagework, harmonics and writing high on the E string that seemed to cost him nothing. Composers noticed: Saint-Saëns, Bruch, Lalo and Wieniawski all wrote for him, and Bruch's Scottish Fantasy and Lalo's Symphonie espagnole reached print with his name on the dedication page. His own music was made for his own hands — Zigeunerweisen, the Carmen Fantasy, the Introduction and Tarantella, the four books of Spanish Dances with their jotas, habaneras and zapateados — and it carried a cosmopolitan idea of Spanish music into halls that had never heard the originals. He died in 1908. The Queen's support took the form of a Stradivari that he carried on tour, and at the Conservatoire, which he entered at twelve in 1856, he studied composition with Reber alongside the violin lessons with Alard. His touring reached well beyond Europe, to North and South America, India and Japan, and he died at Biarritz at sixty-five.