Manuel de Falla

Extract

The death last November of Manuel de Falla in the Argentine did not remove a figure who had been lately in the minds of musicians and music-lovers. Rather did it bring his picture back to their memories—the almost forgotten picture of a small, dried-up little man looking like some fanatical monk ready to go to the torture for an ideal, right or wrong. Almost forgotten: the man who twenty years ago was in the foreground as the most eminent living Spanish composer had long receded into a baffling obscurity. If he was mentioned at all, there were hints of some mystery or other. Some said his reason had gone, others that he had become a religious recluse, and some concluded from these rumours that there was some truth in both because these things may be interdependent.