Albéniz

The story goes that he ran away from home as a boy and worked his way across South America playing piano; how much of it is true remains uncertain, since he was an excellent inventor of stories about himself. What is certain is that he was a formidable pianist who only turned seriously to composition in middle age.

The twelve pieces of Iberia are the summit of Spanish piano music and among the hardest music written for the instrument. He writes the sound of the flamenco guitar into the piano — arpeggios that imitate plucking, falseta-like improvised phrasing, and the flattened second of the Andalusian mode. Both Debussy and Ravel acknowledged the debt in public.