Manuel de Falla

La Vida Breve: Danza Espanola No. 1 (Spanish Dance No. 1)

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) originally wrote the 2-act opera La Vida Breve (Life is Short or The Brief Life) between 1904 and 1905 for a composition competition which offered a large monetary prize and the hope of a performance at one of Madrid's theaters. Based on a tragic poem by Carlos Fernández Shaw called El Chavalillo (The Little Lass), it tells the story of a young gypsy girl who is passionately in love with a well-to-do young man. When she learns that he must marry a woman in his social class, she crashes the wedding, the young man denies he knows her, then she falls dead at his feet with a broken heart as a sign of contempt for her former lover. Despite winning the prize, no premiere materialized until the Casino Municipal in Nice staged the work on April 1, 1913. After some suggestions from Claude Debussy, de Falla revised the work into the standard version.

While the opera is staged irregularly, some of its sections are popular for concert performance. Among those is Danza Española No. 1 (Spanish Dance No. 1), originally published as Interlude and Dance. In the opera, it takes place at the betrothal celebration of the young man and the woman he must marry. In the dance, the infectious theme moves about the orchestra as a contrast to the melancholy (for the gypsy girl) of the story surrounding this party. Instrumentation: 2+Picc.2+EH.2+BCl.2: 4.2.3.1: Timp.Perc(5): Hp(2).Clst: Str (9-8-7-6-5 in set).