Chabrier: España

Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)

España


Chabrier was raised in the Auvergne. He showed an early gift for music and was composing at 14, but his family were lawyers and tradesmen by trade and he duly followed his father's footsteps, gaining a job at the Ministry of the Interior in 1861 which he held for 19 years. His frustration at the restrictions his work put on his burgeoning composing career grew gradually. During the 1870s he began a number of stage works, but only completed one, L’étoile, which was successfully staged in 1877. In 1880 he heard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for the first time, and within months resigned his post to concentrate on music.


Chabrier composed España after a holiday in Spain in 1882. It is based on two dance forms that he encountered there: the lively Jota and the more sensuous Malagueña. It was originally titled Jota before finding its final title at its completion in October 1883. On hearing it, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla said that no Spaniard had composed a finer evocation of the Jota. It rapidly spread through the salons and drawing rooms of Europe via a number of arrangements and made Chabrier internationally famous.

Chabrier is today known almost exclusively for España, and familiarity has perhaps dulled our reaction to it. What is generally considered now to be an attractive piece of light orchestral music was declared by Gustav Mahler introducing it to the players of the New York Philharmonic as nothing less than "the beginnings of modern music." Renoir's wife Aline meanwhile recalled hearing Chabrier playing it on the piano: "it sounded as though a hurricane had been let loose."