On February 27, 1806, exactly 50 years after Mozart's birth, the composer Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga was born in the Basque city of Bilbao, Spain. He was called "the Spanish Mozart" due to his precocious musical intelligence and, of course, to the aforementioned coincidence, in addition to his premature death. The young musician did not reach the age of twenty, dying of a lung infection ten days earlier.
At the Paris Conservatory
At the age of fourteen, Arriaga was already a skilled violinist, although it is not certain whether his technical abilities were an innate skill or the result of the teachings of some unknown maestro he may have had in Bilbao.
What is certain is that at the age of fifteen he was admitted to the Paris Conservatory to continue his violin studies, and acquire the necessary knowledge in counterpoint and harmony. Two years later, he won the second prize in the Conservatory in fugue and counterpoint, and soon after he became an assistant instructor of a harmony course. He was seventeen.
His works
J. C. de Arriaga (1806 - 1826)
It is not surprising then that at the age of eighteen he had already composed three string quartets, and had begun to dabble in vocal and choral music. His Stabat Mater is one of his most successful large-scale works. His last two years of life were devoted to finishing his extensive Symphony in D major.
Of course, his musical production was scarce, and this resulted in his oblivion for almost eighty years, until at the end of the 19th-century scholars noticed this great musical promise that simply did not give its full potential.
Opera "Los Esclavos Felices" (The Happy Slaves)
Among his early works, those that justly earned him the title of a child prodigy, stands out an opera in two acts, entitled Los Esclavos Felices, composed and produced in Bilbao when the author was only thirteen years old. When the work came to the knowledge of his teachers at the Conservatory, they could only point out that the young Arriaga had composed "a Spanish opera full of original ideas and harmonic richness without having any knowledge of harmony".
With a clear Italian influence and tributary of the purest Viennese classicism, the Overture is presented here (7:30 min) in a performance by the Orquesta Clásica Santa Cecilia, from Madrid.
