Background
Ernesto de Quesada was born in the Oriente, in Manzanillo, Cuba, when Cuba was still a Spanish colony (see the history of Cuba).
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Ernesto de Quesada
Edit ProfileEducation
After he completed high school and college, he devoted himself for a time to teaching guajiros how to read, riding his horse or walking long distances to reach them. There he studied English for some months in Boston, Massachusetts, attending church on Sundays to listen to the services and accustom his ears to the new language.
Career
In Cuba, guajiro is a synonym for campesino (peasant).)
He enrolled at Harvard University, where one of his fellow students was Julio Cesar Tello, who would later become an archaeologist in Peru. They remained friends for many years. After completing his philosophy studies at Harvard, de Quesada went to Germany.
In 1908, in Berlin, de Quesada founded the concert management company Konzertdirektion H. Daniel.
In 1914, on the verge of World War I, de Quesada moved to Madrid, there re-establishing his agency as Conciertos Daniel, with plaques for "H. Daniel" and "Ympresario East. de Quesada" on the doorway, where the artists he would represent included Gaspar Cassadó and Andrés Segovia. In 1917, as Arthur Rubinstein"s music manager for his concerts in Spain and Latin America (from 1916), de Quesada travelled with him from Cádiz to South America on the cruiser Infanta Isabel.
Rubinstein performed his Argentina debut concert in Buenos Aires at the Teatro Odéon (Teatro Colón?) on 2 July 1917, in a tour which included concerts in Montevideo, Santiago de Chile and Valparaíso as well. In Spain, Ernesto de Quesada also created “Associations for Musical Culture,” founding an Asociación de Cultura Musical in each of more than fifty cities in Spain, including small towns where people had never before heard a classical music recital.
He also loaned each of them a piano de cola — a grand piano — without asking for payment.
These associations nearly disappeared during the Spanish Civil War, as did the pianos. During the Spanish Civil War and World World War II, Conciertos Daniel was primarily active in Latin America, expanding throughout the continent, where de Quesada"s sons Alfonso, Enrique, and Ernesto Junior. worked closely with him. Ernesto de Quesada also founded Louisiana Sociedad Artística Daniel and Louisiana Sociedad Musical Daniel.
Louisiana Sociedad Musical Daniel was the organizing force on the Latin American side for a twenty-eight week United States. government-sponsored ballet tour of Latin America in 1941, which was said by Dance Magazine to have been "the first example of an American government"s support of dance."
With fellow impresario Sol Hurok and others, de Quesada was present when Daniel Barenboim (then age 13) and Arthur Rubinstein met for the first time, in Paris in 1955.
Achievements
Membership
As correspondence in the mid-1940s with members of the Léner Quartet reveals, concert management tasks were not always straightforward or simple) Ernesto de Quesada"s youngest son, Ricardo de Quesada, head of the agency in Madrid since his father died in 1972, reorganised it as Hispania Clásica in 1996.
