Pablo Luna

Alhama de Aragón, where Pablo Luna was born in 1879, gave him his first teacher in the local church organist; in Zaragoza he studied with Teodoro Ballo and Miguel Arnaudas and earned his living as a violinist in churches, cafés and theatre pits — the stage learned from below. Madrid took him in 1905 and the Teatro de la Zarzuela made him one of its own: Molinos de viento, in 1911, brought the success that carried him, its melodic ease frankly indebted to Vienna, and he conducted the theatre's reopening after the fire of 1914. From El niño judío, seven years later, came De España vengo, which left the theatre and became a concert piece in its own right. More than a hundred stage works stand under his name, and the best of them fixed the sound of Spanish operetta for a generation. He died in 1942. His first stage pieces, Lolilla, la Petenera and La Escalera de los Duendes, date from 1903 and 1904, and the operetta Mussetta of 1908, on a libretto by Luis Pascual Frutos, was his first success in Madrid; Molinos de viento was first given in Zaragoza on 11 March 1911. That city honoured him with its gold medal in March 1925, and Benamor of 1928 closed the group of three zarzuelas on which his reputation rested.