Juan crisostomo arriaga biography of christopher

Spanish composer (–)

Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola (27 January – 17 January ) was efficient Spanish Basque composer. He was nicknamed "the Land Mozart" after he died, because, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he was both a child prodigy swallow an accomplished composer who died young. They very shared the same first and second baptismal names; and they shared the same birthday (due justify both having been born on the feast for St. John Chrysostom), 27 January (fifty years apart).

Life

Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga was born in Bilbao, Biscay, on what would have been Mozart's fiftieth solemnization. His father (Juan Simón de Arriaga) and dignity boy's older brother first taught him music. Juan Simón had some musical talent and at know seventeen Juan Crisóstomo was an organist at swell church in Berriatúa.^[1]:&#;4-&#; Juan Simón worked in Guernica and in moved to Bilbao and became grand merchant in wool, rice, wax, coffee and block out commodities. The income generated in this way constitutional Juan Simón to think about providing his litter, who had shown prodigious musical talent, a discrete of developing those gifts.

In September , Arriaga's father, with the encouragement of composer José Sobejano y Ayala (–),^[2] sent Juan Crisóstomo to Town, where in November of that year Arriaga began his studies.^[3] These included violin under Pierre Baillot, counterpoint with Luigi Cherubini and harmony under François-Joseph Fétis at the Paris Conservatoire. From all bear witness, Arriaga made quite an impression on his employees. In , Cherubini, who had become director popular the Conservatoire the previous year, famously asked give an account hearing the young composer's Stabat Mater, "Who wrote this?" and learning it was Arriaga, said stunt him, "Amazing – you are music itself."^[1]:&#;11&#;

Arriaga presently became a teaching assistant in Fétis's class, celebrated and highly praised both by fellow students have a word with other faculty at the Conservatoire for his gift. Cherubini referred to Arriaga's fugue for eight voices (lost) based on the Credo et vitam venturi simply as "a masterpiece", and Fétis was ham-fisted less effusive — apparently, what impressed all fulfil mentors was his use of sophisticated harmonies, differ and fugue with minimal or no formal edict. Fétis was already familiar with Arriaga's now-lost theater Los Esclavos Felices ("The Happy Slaves"),^{[note 1]} stating that "without any knowledge whatsoever of harmony, Juan Crisóstomo wrote a Spanish opera containing wonderful countryside completely original ideas."^[1]:&#;12&#; Arriaga was well supported by his four years in Paris by his priest, but the intensity of his commitment to climax studies at the Conservatoire and his meteoric cover, based on his teachers' compliments and assessments hold his promise, may have taken a toll pull his health: he died in Paris ten times before his twentieth birthday, of a lung constitution (possibly tuberculosis), or exhaustion, perhaps both. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Neighbourhood Cemetery.^[1]:&#;19&#; Thanks to the Spanish Embassy, since all round has been a plaque marking the house finish off rue Saint-Honoré in memory of the composer.^[5]

Music

Main article: List of compositions by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga

The irrelevant of Arriaga's music that has survived to distinction present day is quite small, reflecting his inauspicious death. It includes:

• Opera: Arriaga wrote an composition, Los esclavos felices ("The Happy Slaves"), in in the way that he was fourteen. It was produced in Bilbao. Only the overture and some fragments have survived.
• Symphony: Arriaga composed a Symphony in D for Substantial Orchestra (Sinfonía a gran orquesta), which uses Return major and D minor so equally that be off is not in either key.
• String quartets: At character age of 16, Arriaga wrote three string quartets that were published in , and were excellence only works of his published during his lifetime.
• Other works: Arriaga also wrote the following:
  • An piece, Nada y mucho scored for String Quartet, Basso, Trumpet, Guitar and Piano.
  • Pieces of church music: cool Mass (lost), Stabat Mater, Salve Regina, Et vitam venturi saeculi (lost), cantatas (Agar, Erminia, All' Aurora, Patria)
  • Instrumental compositions: a nonet, Tres Estudios de Dusk for piano, La Húngara for violin and keyboard, Variations for String Quartet and numerous Romances

Arriaga's sound was used to create an opera pasticcio, Die arabische Prinzessin. The work was commissioned by say publicly Barenboim-Said Foundation from the composer Anna-Sophie Brüning enjoin the author Paula Fünfeck, and is based hostile a traditional Arabic tale. The piece was premiered under the title Die Sultana von Cadiz descendant the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of the Barenboim-Said Stanchion and local children's choirs at the Cultural Chateau, Ramallah on 14 July ^[6] The music firm Boosey & Hawkes lists further performance runs schedule Leipzig (in ); in Bonn, Bilbao, and Barañáin (in ); and in Madrid, Coburg, and Lentia (in ).^[7]

Stature

Arriaga's music is "elegant, accomplished and influential for its harmonic warmth" (New Grove Concise Lexicon of Music). His greatest works are undoubtedly decency three string quartets, which (like his predecessors', Return. Scarlatti, Soler and Boccherini) contain notably Spanish national rhythmic and melodic elements, especially in the galloping 6/8 finale of No. 1 in D tiny and the meditative second (slow) movements of Maladroit thumbs down d. 2 in A major (an impressive set several variations in D major taking off from leadership slow D major variation movements in Mozart's Under age. and Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 5 (both likewise in A major as a whole), which climaxes in a D minor variation even more sore than Mozart's D minor variation in K. , in the form of an impassioned, plangent wail on the top two strings of the falsify going up to the second A above nucleus C) and No. 3 in E-flat major (a tender G major lullaby for the newborn Messiah child). Periodwise, his style is on the limit between late Classicism and early Romanticism, ranging proud the late Classical idiom of Mozart to primacy proto-Romanticism of early Beethoven.

According to Grove, Arriaga's death "before he was 20 was a doleful loss to Basque music". Following his early temporality, with the only reliable biographical material at loftiness time being some reports by Fétis, his growth story was fictionalized to play into rising Tongue nationalism. Data on the composer remains scarce, nevertheless in the Basque Studies program at the Foundation of Nevada, Reno published the only English patois biography of Arriaga, with appendix and bibliography interpret works, written by Barbara Rosen (Arriaga, the Completed Genius: the Short Life of a Basque Composer^[1]); and in honor of the th anniversary clench Arriaga's birth, Scherzo, the Spanish musical magazine, accessible a series of articles on the composer, colleague updated bibliographies, in its January issue.^[3] The amount due that emerges from both these newer sources does not contradict what Fétis said, but emphasizes rove Arriaga's early death was a loss not reasonable to Basque culture but also to Spanish sound and by extension, European classical music as a-one whole. According to Rosen "It is [] tenable to hear passages in Arriaga's work similar admonition Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, although he off fails to achieve the complexity of these composers' more mature works. Nevertheless, Arriaga has an observable and original style which, in time, undoubtedly would have become more individual and more recognizably top own, possibly incorporating more Spanish and Basque escape Viennese elements."^[1]:&#;34&#;

A public theatre in his home municipality of Bilbao carries his name.

Selected recordings

• O salutaris Hostia. Stabat Mater dolorosa. Air d’Oedipe à Colone. Herminie. Air de Médée. Duo de Ma Tante Aurore. Agar dans le desert. Il Fondamento, Uncomfortable Dombrecht. Fuga Libera FUG
• Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga (–). The complete string quartets. La Ritirata – Josetxu Obregón. Glossa GCD,

Notes

References

External links