Fernando Remacha

Fernando Remacha Villar (Tudela, 1898 – Tudela, 1984) was a Spanish composer associated with Navarre and with musical life in Madrid in the first third of the twentieth century. Although he is usually placed among the members of the so-called Grupo de los Ocho de Madrid, also known as the Generation of 1927, his studies abroad and his devotion to sacred music set him apart from his colleagues, though he shared with them the desire to bring European currents into Spanish music.

He trained as a violinist with José del Hierro and, at the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, with del Campo, among other teachers. He then studied in Rome with Malipiero, and there he won the Spanish Rome Prize in 1923. In the 1930s he worked as an arranger and composer for the film companies Filmófono and Cinematiraje Riera. The Spanish Civil War temporarily interrupted his career, which he gradually rebuilt over the course of the 1940s.

His style evolved over time. His early works show nationalist, impressionist and atonal features, as in La maja vestida, the Tres piezas para piano and Alba. By the mid-1920s he had adopted a neoclassical language, visible in Quam pulchri sunt and the Suite para violín y piano. In the 1940s and 1950s he composed mainly commissioned works with a strong local colour, although he also wrote pieces of notable artistic value, such as Elegía sin palabras and the Concierto para guitarra, written in a largely diatonic idiom. In the 1960s, some of his most important pieces, such as the cantata Jesucristo en la cruz, rest on twelve-tone series.

In 1957 he was appointed director of the newly founded Pablo Sarasate Conservatory in Pamplona, a post from which he devoted himself mainly to music teaching until his retirement in 1973. His honours include three Premios Nacionales de Música (1933, 1938 and 1980), the Premio Tomás Luis de Victoria (1963), the title of Hijo Predilecto de Tudela (1973) and the Premio Pablo Iglesias (1981). His legacy is largely preserved in the Biblioteca General de Navarra, and his output remains a reference for understanding mid-twentieth-century Spanish music from a peripheral and pedagogical perspective.