Perhaps the story of Isaac Albéniz is not the most colourful, unlikely or fascinating of any composer’s life. But it can’t be far off, especially as accounts of it have often been liberally peppered with self-created disinformation. Paul Dukas once termed him ‘a Don Quixote with the manner of Sancho Panza’ and his biographer, Walter Aaron Clark, found discrepancies in information that showed he was a deeply unreliable narrator of his own existence. For instance, his account of studying with Liszt in Budapest turned out to be pure fantasy. The genuine side of Albéniz’s irrepressible spirit, however, lives on in his great-hearted music.
Along with his compatriots Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla, Albéniz’s importance is bound up with the musical nationalism of the late-19th and early-20th centuries: his work is inextricably connected to his native Spain, its traditional music and its folklore. In person, though, he
