My recent piece about Edvard Grieg put me in mind of another nationalist composer that deserves to be played and heard more. Isaac Albéniz's vast and varied output includes choral music, operas and symphonic rhapsodies, but the greatest and best part of his work consists of his music for solo piano. He has made an outstanding and underrated contribution to our instrument, striking an impressive balance between impeccable technique and a form of expression that is absolutely Spanish in its rhythms and melodies.

Albéniz was born in Camprodón on May 29th 1860, the youngest of four children. His family moved to Barcelona when he was still an infant, and he received his first piano lessons from his sister, Clementina. He gave his first concert at the tender age of four, and studied with Narcís Oliveres until he was six before continuing his lessons with Antoine-François Marmontel in Paris. On his return to Spain he studied briefly with Oliveres again, before the family moved to Madrid and he took lessons with Manuel Mendizábal.

Aged just ten, Albéniz left the family home and began organising his own concert tours. These took him around his native Spain, and two years later to South America. After another tour of the Iberian Peninsula he returned to the Americas in 1875, giving concerts in Puerto Rico, Havana, Santiago, Mexico City and New York, and on his return to Europe he toured England and travelled to Leipzig. In a letter to his sister he complained of being weary of his international travels, something few fifteen-year-olds will relate to I'm sure!

In 1880 Europe was mourning the death of Jacques Offenbach, but for the precocious young Albéniz the year had an altogether different significance. On August 18th he talked his way into an audience with Franz Liszt, always a galvanising influence for young composers. Albéniz recounted the experience in his diary: 'He asked me about Spain, about my parents, about my ideas on religion and about music in general. I gave him honest answers, and he seemed delighted. I am to see him again the day after tomorrow.'

What must the great Abbé Liszt have thought of this crazy young man, who had performed in circuses playing little Spanish tunes with his back to the piano and who had been refused admission to the Paris Conservatoire on account of his age! Liszt has been derided for the way he used folk music, but when he evoked Spain he turned to the country's courtly folia (a sung dance) rather than crude clichés. It seems he discussed this with Albéniz, astutely judging that it would temper the young man's exuberance.

The Six Pequeños Valses (Six Little Waltzes, Op. 25) were written around the time of Albéniz's visit to Liszt. He was at the height of his romantic phase, during which he produced quantities of études and other salon and didactic pieces at five pesetas a page for the publisher Romero. "It wasn't much", he later admitted, "but I did the work very quickly". Clearly influenced by Chopin (and not dissimilar to some of Smetana's shorter piano pieces), the waltzes simply bear a tempo marking or a description of their character.

An Anarchic Catalogue

Contrary to appearances, Albéniz was not a bohemian at heart and did not shy away from academic discipline. In the early 1890s he published his student sonatas and the three Suite Antiguas (comprising minuets, gavottes, barcarolles, pavanes and chaconnes) while his concert programmes favoured the music of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn and Weber. He also liked Haydn, and the French pianist-composers Louis Diemer and Raoul Pugno drew his attention to Couperin, Rameau and Scarlatti.

Albéniz produced hundreds of sometimes rambling pieces that he scattered about, forgot about or abandoned, only to revive years later (often with new content and titles) as and when they came back to mind. His profuse output, which contains many duplicate works and is virtually impossible to catalogue chronologically or stylistically, is full of pieces inspired by the places he had visited. The composer himself classified these as mere trifles, but they display a technical sophistication and flair that merit informed interpretation.

Iberia didn't appear until 1905, but between 1885 and 1895 Albéniz began to move towards a new intellectual and stylistic curiosity. Many works are in ternary form and, while based on the traditional French overture, suddenly open up new vistas, embracing huge landscapes before returning to normality. The Six Mazurkas de Salón (Six Salon Mazurkas, Op. 66) were composed around 1885. On their covers they bear drawings of calling cards, with the corners turned down and the name of their dedicatees.

The Six Spanish Dances were also written before 1887, again as salon music and for didactic purposes (the composer dedicated all but one to pupils of his). Here we find the first hints of his need to find his own, identifiably Spanish idiom. Albéniz distances himself from Chopin, whose aesthetic influence had thus far been so significant, by writing music with both a Cuban and Spanish feel (Cuba was still a Spanish colony at the time). The emphasis is very much on rhythm, and the dances are characteristic of his later writing.

In 1886 Recuerdos de Viaje (Travel Reminiscences) appeared, a miscellaneous collection of musical postcards composed at different times and in various places. The work contains seven well-structured miniatures, in turn melancholy and passionate and often with subtle harmonic effects. These, too, are pieces of an obviously Spanish nature. While lacking the contrapuntal aspects of his later writing, they demonstrate his facility with melody and some of the movements became very popular in their time (especially on pianola rolls).

While Chabrier cultivated an attention-grabbing element of surprise in his music, Albéniz managed to capture the imagination of the Parisian avant-garde almost unconsciously. Yet he was to spend several more years in relative obscurity before producing his first masterpiece in 1897. La Vega (The Plains) evokes in epic terms the plains of Andalucía, under the onslaught of wind and draught. Albéniz had been working away inconspicuously, proving that he was not just another purveyor of Hispanic pap for novelty-hungry Paris.

The Genesis of a Masterpiece

La Vega has sometimes been compared with Balakirev's technically fearsome oriental fantasy, Islamey. It was originally conceived as an orchestral suite, inspired by the poetry of the banker Francis Money-Coutts (Albéniz's long-time English patron). However, as was so typical of Albéniz, the project was soon abandoned and all we are left with today is a piano realisation of the first movement. The work again displays his nationalistic style, and hints at some of the musical innovations that would later appear in Iberia.

1900 marked a turning point for the forty-year-old composer. Enrique Granados' Op. 37 Danzas Españolas (Spanish Dances), inspired by the Spanish national school of Felipe Pedrell, were published and Debussy and Ravel were also stealing a march on Albéniz. Indeed, Paris was home to many gifted composer-pianists at the time, including Saint-Saëns, Fauré and Roger-Ducasse, and visitors to the city in the early 1900s included Grieg, Scriabin and Rachmaninov. Albéniz began to wonder where his art was going.

He needed to avoid being long-winded but was unsure whether to aim for terseness, richer textures or greater linearity. Asturias, from Recuerdos de Viaje, has an undeniable grandeur, and it seems no coincidence that he republished it at the turn of the century under the rather more appealing title 'Leyenda' (Legend). The piece demonstrates the commanding sense of line, purged of any excess, which Albéniz would soon succeed in developing and enriching without ever losing track of the musical argument.

The conception of Iberia was also stimulated in 1904 by the first performance in France of Bach's complete works for keyboard (seventeen concerts in total!). Bach was already among Albéniz's influences, as can be seen in the gentle passages of La Vega, and some of Bach's mood can also be found in the prelude to Iberia. (You can hear the distinctly French sound of the whole-tone scale too, which gives the piece its impressionistic flavour.) A panoramic sketch with the abstract title Evocación, it was completed in December 1905.

It was with Iberia that Albéniz's contribution to Spanish nationalism reached its apogee. His writing became an act of consecration, but lost none of its astonishing focus as Spain transcended its borders. (Seven years later, Stravinsky was to do much the same for Russia with the Rite of Spring.) Iberia is inhabited by melodies that he succeeded in forging into a dam to stem the flow of clichés that had previously evoked his homeland, and the work now stands as one of the monuments of twentieth century piano repertoire.

It represents the fulfilment of the aim that had inspired Albéniz's career, which consisted, he said, of creating "Spanish music with a universal accent". He was already seriously ill when, in less than two years, he composed the twelve pieces which represent both the aesthetic and technical culmination of post-romantic piano music. Olivier Messiaen described Iberia as "perhaps on the highest place among the more brilliant pieces for the king of the instruments", and next month I will explore its individual movements.