La vida breve

Composer: FALLA, Manuel de
  • La vida breve (The Short Life): Falla wrote the first version of this opera in 1904, and in 1905 it won a competition for Spanish operas put on by the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.1
  • After several revisions, including some advised by Debussy,2 La vida breve premiered in Nice, France, in 1913, to great acclaim.3
  • In La vida breve, Falla sought to combine authentic Roma (“Gypsy”) music with verismo style.4
  • French critics praised the opera’s authentic depiction of life in Granada, but actually, Falla had never been there: he had asked his friends to send him postcards of Granada while he was composing.5
  • Synopsis from Naxos

Sources

  1. Carol A. Hess, “Falla (y Matheu), Manuel de,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed September 24, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000009266.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 38.
  4. Hess, “Falla (y Matheu), Manuel de,” Grove Music Online.
  5. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 38.

Cut IDs

19269 41023 41050 41971 45357