The Spanish Mozart

Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola (27 January 1806 – 17 January 1826) was a Spanish Basque composer. He was nicknamed “the Spanish Mozart” after he died, because, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he was both a child prodigy and an accomplished composer who died young. They also shared the same first and second baptismal names; and they shared the same birthday, 27 January (fifty years apart).

I – Adagio – Allegro vivace – Presto

II – Andante:

III – Menuetto. Allegro – Trio – Tempo I: 18:10

IV – Allegro con moto:

Mozart’s 50th birthday:

Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga was born in Bilbao, Biscay, on what would have been Mozart’s fiftieth birthday. His father (Juan Simón de Arriaga) and the boy’s older brother first taught him music.

Taught by his family:

In September 1821, Arriaga’s father, with the encouragement of composer José Sobejano y Ayala (1791–1857), sent Juan Crisóstomo to Paris, where in November of that year Arriaga began his studies.

Very well respected by everyone:

Arriaga soon became a teaching assistant, noted and highly praised both by fellow students and other faculty at the Conservatoire for his talent.

He was not yet 20 years old when he died.

He died in Paris ten days before his twentieth birthday, of a lung ailment (possibly tuberculosis), or exhaustion, perhaps both.

Here are some works that have survived

Arriaga wrote an opera, Los esclavos felices (“The Happy Slaves”), in 1820 when he was fourteen. It was produced in Bilbao. Only the overture and some fragments have survived.

Arriaga composed his Symphony in D for Large Orchestra (Sinfonía a gran orquesta), at age 18.

String quartets: At the age of 16, Arriaga wrote three quartets that were published in 1824, and were the only works of his published during his lifetime.

An octet, Nada y mucho scored for String Quartet, Bass, Trumpet, Guitar and Piano.
Pieces of church music: a Mass (lost),

Stabat Mater, Salve Regina, Et vitam venturi saeculi (lost), cantatas (Agar, Erminia, All’ Aurora, Patria)

Instrumental compositions: a nonet, Tres Estudios de Character for piano, La Húngara for violin and piano, Variations for String Quartet and numerous Romances

Arriaga’s music was used to create an opera pasticcio, Die arabische Prinzessin. The work was commissioned by the Barenboim-Said Foundation from the composer Anna-Sophie Brüning and the author Paula Fünfeck, and is based on a traditional Arabic tale. The piece was premiered under the title Die Sultana von Cadiz by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of the Barenboim-Said Foundation and local children’s choirs at the Cultural Palace, Ramallah on 14 July 2009.[6] The music publisher Boosey & Hawkes lists further performance runs in Leipzig (in 2011); in Bonn, Bilbao, and Barañáin (in 2013); and in Madrid, Coburg, and Linz (in 2014).[7]
Stature
The Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao is one of the centers of the August city festivals

Arriaga’s music is “elegant, accomplished and notable for its harmonic warmth” (New Grove Concise Dictionary of Music). His greatest works are undoubtedly the three string quartets, which (like his predecessors’, D. Scarlatti, Soler and Boccherini) contain notably Spanish ethnic rhythmic and melodic elements, especially in the galloping 6/8 finale of No. 1 in D minor and the meditative second (slow) movements of No. 2 in A major (an impressive set of variations in D major taking off from the slow D major variation movements in Mozart’s K. 464 and Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 5 (both also in A major as a whole), which climaxes in a D minor variation even more passionate than Mozart’s D minor variation in K. 464, in the form of an impassioned, plangent lament on the top two strings of the viola going up to the second A above middle C) and No. 3 in E-flat major (a tender G major lullaby for the newborn Christ child). Periodwise, his style is on the borderline between late Classicism and early Romanticism, ranging from the late Classical idiom of Mozart to the proto-Romanticism of early Beethoven.