Lecuona y Casado, Ernesto (1895–1963)
Lecuona y Casado, Ernesto (1895–1963)
Ernesto Lecuona y Casado (b. 6 August 1895; d. 29 November, 1963), Cuban pianist and composer. Lecuona, born in Guanabacoa, began to play the piano when he was barely four years old—he had to climb on a box to reach the keyboard. As the great Ignacy Jan Paderewski once noted, he gave the impression that "he had nothing to learn. Nature had made him a prodigious pianist." Thus pianists sometimes have difficulty playing many of his works because they were composed by an extraordinary master of the keyboard. He had the same natural gift for composing. Many times his works went straight to the publisher without Lecuona's having played them even once.
In this somewhat undisciplined fashion Lecuona's creative genius produced three groups of works. The first encompasses the bulk of his early boleros, guarachas, and criollas—Cuban music with European roots. The second is made up of Afro-Cuban compositions, which he began to write around 1920, the best known of which is probably the elegant and sensuous dance "La Comparsa." The third, less numerous group is his Spanish-style works, among which the seven pieces that form his suite Andalucía stand out. It is said that the celebrated French musician Maurice Ravel believed that the semiclassic "Malagueña," one of these Spanish-style works, was more melodic and beautiful than his own "Bolero." Lecuona also wrote a number of works for the theater, from frivolous revues to tragic zarzuelas (Spanish operettas). Many of his best-known songs come from his stage work, among them "Siboney," one of his most popular pieces outside Cuba.
Plácido Domingo, the world-acclaimed tenor, won the 1985 Grammy Award for Latin American songs for his performance of "Always in My Heart," the theme song that Lecuona wrote for the film of the same title, released in the early 1940s. Lecuona died in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gloria Castiel Jacobson, "The Life and Music of Ernesto Lecuona" (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1982).
José I. Lasaga, Cuban Lives: Pages from Cuban History (1988), vol. 2, pp. 411-424.
Additional Bibliography
León, Carmela de. Ernesto Lecuona: El maestro. Ciudad de La Habana: Editora Musical de Cub, 1995.
JosÉ M. HernÁndez