Ernesto Lecuona
Ernesto Lecuona was born in Havana, Cuba, on August 7, 1896. As a boy of eleven he published his first piece of music—an American two step still popular with some Cuban bands. While attending the National Conservatory in Cuba, from which he was graduated in 1911 with a gold medal in piano playing, he earned his living as a pianist in cafés and movie theaters. In 1917 he paid the first of several visits to the United States, at that time making some records and giving a piano recital. He then made concert tours throughout America and Europe playing the piano and conducting semi-classical and popular orchestras. His performances were largely responsible for popularizing in America both the conga and the rumba in the 1920’s. He also made some successful appearances at the Capitol Theater, in New York, where he introduced his own music, including such outstanding successes as Malagueña, Andalucía, and Siboney (the last originally entitled Canto Siboney, which became an American popular-song hit in 1929). These and similar pieces made Lecuona one of the most successful exponents of Latin-American melodies and dance rhythms in the United States. Lecuona has written over five hundred songs, forty operettas, and numerous compositions both for orchestra and for piano solo.
From a piano suite entitled Andalucía come two of Lecuona’s best known instrumental compositions. The first is also called Andalucía, a haunting South American melody set against a compulsive rhythm. It was made into an American popular song in 1955.
Another movement from Andalucía is even more familiar: the Malagueña. Since its publication as a piano solo in 1929, Malagueña has sold annually over a hundred thousand copies of sheet music each year; it has become a favorite of concert pianists; it is also often performed by salon and pop orchestras everywhere in orchestral transcriptions; and it has been adapted into a popular song, “At the Crossroads.” It is in three sections, the first being in the malagueña rhythm dynamically projected in slowing expanding sonorities; a contrast comes in the middle part with a poignant Latin-American melody.
Andalucía, the single movement and not the suite as a whole, has been given a brilliant orchestral dress by Morton Gould who has also orchestrated two outstandingly popular Lecuona songs. One is “La Comparasa,” a picture of a traditional parade during the Carnival season in which Negroes and muleteers play their native instruments and sing their sensual songs. The other is “Gitanerias,” haunting gypsy music.