Ernesto Lecuona y Casado was a Cuban composer and pianist of worldwide fame. He composed over six hundred pieces, mostly in the Cuban vein, and was a pianist of exceptional skill. His father was Canarian and his mother was Cuban.
Background
Lecuona was born in Guanabacoa, Cuba, on August 6,1895, into a family where all his siblings played a musical instrument. His father, a newspaper editor, sup-ported his children's musical training, and at a very young age, Lecuona began training in music with piano lessons from his sister Ernestina. By the age of 5 he was recognized as a child prodigy and performed his first public piano concert. By the age of 11 he had published his first composition, and was the piano player for the silent films shown at the Fedora Theater in Havana.
Education
At 14 he entered the National Conservatory of Havana and in 1913 graduated with highest honors in piano performance. He first traveled outside Cuba in 1916 when he went to New York City to begin his professional concert career.
Career
Even though Lecuona was a classically trained musician, his musical compositions, from the very beginning, were imbued with Afro-Cuban rhythms. After leaving Cuba, his first professional success came in the early 1920s when he brought major Latin groups to perform in the United States and Europe. While in Paris he met and briefly studied with composer Maurice Ravel and shortly thereafter wrote one of his best-known compositions, "Malagueña." He first played this composition to the public at the Roxy Theatre in New York City in 1927. In 1930 this hit was followed by "Andalucía," another major success, which became much more popular in the United States in its English translation in 1940: "The Breeze and I." During the late 1920s and 1930s Lecuona was at the peak of his musical career and was a leading composer in early sound films, writing music scores for
American and Latin American movies. He wrote the music for a number of MGM films among them Under Cuban Skies (1931), Free Soul (1931) and in 1942 received an Oscar nomination for the song "Always in My Heart for the Warner Brothers film of the same name. Two classical Latin American films that carry some of his signature songs are María la O (1947) and Adiós, Buenos Aires, made in Argentina in the 1940s. His song "Siboney" has been heard in at least three movies, including Italian director Federico Fellini's Amarcord (1973).
In 1932, Lecuona arrived in Spain with his group Lecuona's Cuban Boys. They appeared in theaters, dance halls, and nightclubs of major European cities and won over the public with their lineup of rumbas, congas, and Afro-Cuban tunes enhanced by percussion instruments that were still unknown in most of Europe. Lecuona's Cuban Boys had one of the longest durations of any orchestra. Even after Lecuona's death they continued performing until the bandleaders at that time, the Bruguera brothers, died in 1975.
Lecuona was also a well-known interpreter of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which inspired him to write Rapsodia negra (1937) for piano and orchestra. This included his signature use of percussion and called for the orchestra to use a quijada, or donkey's jawbone, as one of the musical instruments. Like Gershwin, he was a prolific composer whose body of work includes zarzuelas (Spanish operas), cantatas, and operettas. Lecuona's catalog includes 406 songs, 176 piano pieces, 53 theater works, 31 orchestral scores, and 11 film scores, as well as ballets, violin works, and numerous compositions for piano and orchestra totaling over 800 works. His most memorable works are his songs: "The Breeze and I," "Dust Over the Moon," "Say Si Si," "Always in My Heart," "Siboney," "La Comparsa," "María My Own (Maria la O)," and "Malagueña." In 1997 Lecuona was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.
A lifelong bachelor, Lecuona lived in Cuba until 1960, when he became an exile due to the Castro regime. He lived the last few years of his life in New York and Florida. In addition to his musical compositions, he was one of the founders of the Havana Orchestra and is considered to have been instrumental in the development of classical performance in Cuba. His works are considered standard components of any pianist's repertoire. He died on November 29, 1963, while vacationing in the Canary Islands.