Biography
Manuel de Falla was born on 23 November 1876 in Cádiz and received his first music lessons from his mother before studying piano with José Tragó and composition with Felipe Pedrell at the Madrid Conservatory from 1896; Pedrell introduced him to the tradition of early Spanish music. His international breakthrough came with the opera La vida breve, composed in 1904-05 and premiered in Nice in 1913. Falla moved to Paris in 1907, where he befriended Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Isaac Albéniz, but returned to Spain at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and lived from 1915 in Madrid and later in Granada. The following years produced his best-known stage works, including El amor brujo (1915) and The Three-Cornered Hat (1919) for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Falla left the country in 1939 and settled in Alta Gracia, Argentina, where he worked on the unfinished oratorio Atlántida until his death on 14 November 1946.
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