CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Cádiz was a colonial city, in the sense that it was linked to the immense Spanish colonies in America and the Pacific. It was the port from which voyagers embarked for America in the west, and the Philippines, the Marianas, Palau and the Caroline Islands in the far east […]. This is why, since ancient times, the city has been home to foreigners […] along with people from other parts of Spain […]. In Cádiz there are a great number of Catalan surnames, as well as Basque ones, and surnames from other countries […]. Falla’s own surnames are a good example: Falla (the name he acquired from his father’s side) is Valencian, while Matheu (from his mother’s side) is Catalan.
Manuel de Falla himself recounted details of his childhood in a letter to Roland-Manuel (another of his biographers) 2[2] Typed letter from Manuel de Falla to Roland-Manuel, dated Granada, 30 December 1928, written in French. The location of the original is not known. A photocopy may be consulted at the Archivo Manuel de Falla, Granada (hereafter A.M.F.) (correspondence folder 7521). :[…] in my very early childhood, when I was only two or three years old […] La Morilla’s songs, dances and stories opened gateways to a magical world.
La Morilla was the family maid, in whose arms the baby Falla may be seen in one of the earliest photographs of the composer.
[…] Eloísa Galluzzo, a friend of my dear mother and moreover an excellent pianist, took charge of my musical initiation 3[3] Ibid..
So it was that, not yet even ten years old, Falla began studying piano with Eloísa Galluzzo, who shortly afterwards took up a religious vocation, becoming a Sister of Charity in an old people’s home. But, before deciding to become a musician, Falla had wanted to be a writer, as he told Roland-Manuel in the letter cited above:Nevertheless, my vocation, despite my love for some music (not all!), always inclined towards the literary side (prose, not verse) 4[4] Ibid..
Falla’s initial literary preoccupations resulted in the handwritten magazines which he created with his friends between 1889 and 1891: El Burlón and El Cascabel.The young man’s imagination and sensitivity led him to dream up his own world, an Eden or Utopia: the city of Colón, which he populated and governed in his imagination, while defending it from the world outside. In his biography of the composer, Roland-Manuel relates that 5[5] ROLAND-MANUEL. Manuel de Falla. Paris, Cahiers d’Art, 1930, p. 16.
For six years […] [he] seriously carried out the various duties involved in governing his metropolis. The municipal council, the newspaper editors, the academicians and the administrators of societies entered his Eden by the wardrobe door. Musicians too, for there was a magnificent theatre in Colón, where the triumph of the day was El Conde de Villamediana, an opera seria of which Manuel de Falla was both the celebrated composer and the acclaimed conductor.
With adolescence came the discovery of his definitive vocation. In his 1928 letter to Roland-Manuel, Falla comments vividly on his “surrender” to the art of composition at the age of seventeen:From that moment, a kind of conviction – both timid and profound – urged me to leave everything in order to dedicate myself entirely to the study of composition. And that conviction became so strong that I was even afraid of it, for the illusions it awoke within me were well above what I felt capable of doing. I say that not from a purely technical point of view […] but [with regard to] INSPIRATION, in the true and highest sense of the word: that mysterious force without which […] nothing genuinely useful can be achieved, and of which I felt incapable6[6] Typed letter from Manuel de Falla to Roland-Manuel, dated Granada, 30 December 1928 (see note 2)..
At the age of twenty Falla was dividing his time between Cádiz and Madrid, and between two very different spheres of musical life. In his home town, the music room of the family home of Salvador Viniegra – amateur cellist, the driving force behind music life in Cádiz, and, to some extent, patron of young aspiring musicians – was the scene of the premiere (between 1897 and 1899) of some of his first works: Melodía and Romanza, both for cello and piano, and dedicated to Salvador Viniegra. At the same time, Falla was an external student at the Madrid Conservatoire, where his piano teacher was José Tragó. His studies came to an end in 1899, when he obtained the Conservatoire’s first prize in piano.
