Manuel de Falla

Manuel de Falla y Matheu was born on November 23, 1876, in Cádiz, Spain, the son of a Catalan father and a Valencian mother who gave him his first piano lessons. He moved to Madrid as a teenager and entered the Royal Conservatory, where he studied piano with José Tragó and composition with the Spanish nationalist Felipe Pedrell, who urged him toward Iberian folk sources.

He won the Madrid Royal Academy prize in 1905 with his one-act opera La vida breve, a work that drew on Andalusian cante jondo song. He spent the years 1907 to 1914 in Paris, where he absorbed the modernist palette of Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas while keeping Spanish modal language at the core of his idiom.

Returning to Madrid at the outbreak of World War I, he composed his most enduring works in quick succession: the ballet El amor brujo (1915), the symphonic impressions Noches en los jardines de España (1916), and the ballet El sombrero de tres picos (1919), commissioned by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.

He moved to Granada in 1920, lived simply near the Alhambra, and produced the chamber opera El retablo de maese Pedro (1923) and a Harpsichord Concerto written for Wanda Landowska. The Spanish Civil War drove him into exile in Argentina in 1939, and he died in Alta Gracia, Córdoba Province, on November 14, 1946, leaving the cantata Atlántida unfinished.

The name Manuel is the Spanish and Portuguese form of Emmanuel, from the Hebrew Immanu'el meaning God is with us. He raised the name's musical profile across Europe, and it remains a steadfast choice for sons in Spanish-speaking families.