The Manuel de Falla Archive Foundation, Granada City Council, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and Obra Social Caja Granada are the organisers of the exhibition Manuel de Falla: Travels of a Musician at Madrid’s National Auditorium of Music, in the frame of the season Portraits: Falla, organised by the National Centre for Music Dissemination.
The exhibition, arranged with the cooperation of the Spanish Ministry of Culture/INAEM, covers the life and works of the composer through the cities where he lived or which left a notable impression on him: from his native Cádiz (1876) to Córdoba, in Argentina, where he died in 1946, shortly before his 70th birthday, along with early 20th-century Madrid, the Paris of musical impressionism, London, where he made his international name with El sombrero de tres picos (“The Three-Cornered Hat”) (1919), the Barcelona of his mature years and Granada, where he chose to live for almost 20 years (1920-1939), and which he may never have left had it not been for the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on the eve of World War II.
The exhibition reflects directly and simply the rich and complex personality of Falla, positioning his work not only within an appropriate context but also placing it in its specific location within the vast repertoire of music from the first half of the last century. The show is both educational and informative, and has been devised to be put on display in cities connected with the composer. It consists in 35 large-scale canvases which, through photographs, documents and printed texts, introduce the audience to the different sections of the discourse presented.
Visitors to the exhibition will also have the chance to see an audiovisual work which features some of the few moving images which remain of Manuel de Falla, recorded in the 1920s by a friend of the musician at his property in Granada.
