Word: falla
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When frail, nervous Spanish Composer Manuel de Falla died two years ago in voluntary exile in Argentina, he left behind some fiery and famous works: the lyric drama La Vida Breve, the ballets El Amor Brujo and The Three-Cornered-Hat But most of his friends said: "He died too soon; he died without finishing his master piece...
...scholarly, mystic man who led a life of celibate solitude, De Falla began work in 1928 on a great oratorio for soloists chorus and orchestra, based on the Catalonian epic poem, La Atlantida, by Jacinto Verdaguer. When De Falla's Atlantida was finished, he used to tell Argentine friends, he wanted the first performance to be in Buenos Aires...
Then he died and there were squabbles over where to bury him-in Argentina, said his anti-Franco friends; in Spain, said the Spanish embassy. The Franco government won, and De Falla's sister Maria hustled back to Spain with a sackful of his belongings. Since then, she has lived in seclusion with her surviving brother German in the sleepy Andalusian village of San Fernando, jealously guarding a shabby bag which contains La Atlantida-comp-leted down to the last note...
...lovely in a pale taffeta gown, stepped out on the stage of Manhattan's Town Hall, composed her hands and began to sing. Her voice, ranging from a mellow low contralto to a brilliant mezzo-soprano, glided through songs by Gluck, Haydn, Schubert, Rossini, Mahler, Ravel and De-Falla; the performance came to an end with the Sleep-Walking Scene from Verdi's Macbeth. The audience shuffled their programs to look at the name again. Thirtyish Elena Nikolaidi, making her U.S. debut and almost unknown outside Athens and Vienna, had achieved one of the smash hits...
...young Swiss esthete among Paris' musical Young Turks, he had conducted many an uproarious premiere of their raucous and startling works-as they seemed then. Stravinsky's Les Noces, De Falla's Le Tricorne, Ravel's La Valse, Honegger's Pacific 231 (which is dedicated to Ansermet) had first come to life under his baton. Between premieres and table-pounding talk with Picasso, Diaghilev, Prokofiev and Stravinsky ("a man of great culture-and the best businessman I ever knew"), Ansermet mastered the classics-without losing his appetite for the moderns...