Larrocha, Alicia de (1923—)

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Larrocha, Alicia de (1923—)

Spanish composer, one of the greatest pianists of the second half of the 20th century, and the most famous pianist in Spain and the Hispanic world. Name variations: Alicia de la Rocha. Born Alicia de Larrocha y de la Calle in Barcelona, Spain, on May 23, 1923; daughter of Eduardo de Larrocha and Maria Teresa de la Calle; studied with Frank Marshall (1883–1959) at the Granados Academy; married Juan Torra, on June 21, 1950; children: Juan Francisco and Alicia.

Began to study piano at Academia Marshall at age three; gave first public performance (1929); played with Madrid Symphony, age 11 (1934); made first international tour (1947); played in U.S. (1954–55); awarded Grand Prix du Disque (1960); awarded Paderewski Medal (1961); performed in New York to great critical acclaim (1965); named Musical America's Musician of the Year (1977); awarded Deutscher Schallplatten Prize (1979); won the Spanish Order of Civil Merit and the Harriet Cohen Medal; became known for her incisive and unique interpretation of the classical piano repertoire.

When her aunt closed and locked the piano, her favorite plaything, three-year-old Alicia screamed in frustration. "I put my head on the floor and banged it," she recounted years later. "I was in a real temper, and I did it so hard that blood began to flow out." In face of the child's determination to play, her mother took Alicia to the nearby Academia Marshall, where Frank Marshall agreed to accept the young prodigy as a student. Thus began the training of Alicia de Larrocha, the celebrated musician who earned a place among the elite pianists of the 20th century.

Born on May 23, 1923, to Eduardo de Larrocha and Maria Teresa de la Calle in Barcelona, Spain, Alicia de Larrocha was surrounded by music. Her mother was an accomplished pianist and former student of Enrique Granados. Alicia's aunt taught at the Academia which Granados founded in 1909 and which his favorite student, Frank Marshall, directed following the master's tragic death in 1916. At age five, Alicia gave her first public performance. After several concerts in Barcelona over the next six years, she played a Mozart concerto with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Fernández Arbos. Meanwhile, her family and conservatory connections helped acquaint Alicia with the leading figures of Spanish music. She also met great virtuosos such as Artur Rubinstein when they played in Barcelona and visited the Academia.

The 1930s were, however, a time of travail for Spain, culminating in the Civil War of 1936–39. The young pianist found her life disrupted in many ways. Barcelona was a Republican center of resistance to Francisco Franco's ultimately victorious Nationalist forces. Fearing that the Loyalists would kill him in the anarchy that enveloped Barcelona, Marshall fled the country. So did many of the Barcelona artistic community, and Larrocha found herself on her own. Remembering the final days of the war, she recalled: "We had no food in the last six months; it was a tragedy. My father went to the mountains to get greens to eat because we had no wood, no bread, no oil."

Despite such interruptions, music had become "my life, though I confess I never thought

about giving concerts or making music my career. I just wanted music to be as much a part of my physiology as the heart, lungs, and other vital organs were. Music fulfilled a need, a craving, and that was it." She learned quickly and easily, often a piece in a single day. Yet Larrocha truly wanted to be an operatic or lieder singer. On the eve of the war, she had thrown herself into practice, only to find it caused polyps on her vocal cords. Nonetheless, she continued serious vocal training as late as 1950. Her music was not work but fun to her, and she had few professional ambitions. Spaniards considered music an avocation for enjoyment, and her mother had given up her musical career when she married. In fact, her mother sometimes worried that Alicia spent too much time at the piano, that she was missing life. But her parents still gave her freedom to play if and when she chose.

At the end of the war, Frank Marshall returned to Barcelona, and Larrocha resumed her studies with him. During the 1940s, she played occasional concerts in Spain, the Canary Islands, and Spanish Morocco but did not actively seek engagements. Her first foray north of the Pyrenees came in 1947, when she played in Paris, Geneva, Lausanne, London, Edinburgh, and Brussels. Three years later, she married pianist and teacher Juan Torra.

In 1954, conductor Alfred Wallenstein, who had heard Larrocha in Europe, invited her to perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. That trip also afforded the opportunity to play with the San Francisco Symphony, under the baton of Enrique Jordá, and some Barcelona friends arranged her New York debut at Town Hall in 1955. These excursions brought her generally favorable reviews, but only in 1965 did she return to the United States. During the intervening decade, she had two children (Juan Francisco and Alicia), continued to tour Europe, made occasional records for Decca, taught at the Academia, and became its director when Marshall died in 1959. Her recording of Isaac Albéniz's Iberia for Columbia won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1960. A year later in London, she received the Paderewski Medal for pianists. Nevertheless, Larrocha mounted no publicity campaign to promote her career and did not pursue American concerts. "I didn't mind," she remarked. "I wasn't ambitious."

Then, in 1965, Herbert Breslin, a New York promoter, wrote to inquire about her interest in playing in the United States, even though he had only heard her records. Larrocha's husband feared that Breslin wanted them to advance him money for a promotional campaign, and the couple did not respond to the letter. But Breslin was so enthused about her artistry that he persisted, offering her several concerts with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which she accepted. Thus, at age 42, her career began its meteoric rise. To rave reviews, she played four times with the Philharmonic and gave a recital at Hunter College, the latter attended by Artur Rubinstein, Claudio Arrau, and Ania Dorfmann . They listened to selections from Iberia by Albéniz and from Goyescas by Granados, plus sonatas by Soler and Schubert, and Bach's English Suite No. 2. The New York Times' music critic Harold C. Schonberg reported that her performance was "pianistically flawless, with infallible fingers, brilliant sonorities, steady rhythm, everything." Larrocha had put the lie to the impression that she had little more than a Spanish repertoire. By the end of the year, following the death in 1965 of Dame Myra Hess , critics and public acclaimed her the reigning female pianist.

Certainly Larrocha never considered herself a Spanish specialist nor restricted herself to any particular period, though her interest and study never went beyond Prokofiev. "In my choice of composers, I enjoy going from one to the other," she said. "I suppose I might be called a free spirit in this regard. I totally believe that in every period there are new moods, new idioms, and peoples are searching for new systems." Larrocha's training under Marshall had first emphasized Mozart, Bach, and the other great European composers. Such repertoire was essential before she began playing Spanish music.

Once she had built a foundation on those masters, Marshall had helped her dominate the great Spanish composers. By then, she was 17. Through him, wrote New York Times critic Donal Henahan in 1976, "she came to clairvoyant understanding of the music of Granados, Falla and Albéniz, the trinity of Spanish music." Larrocha understood that her nation's music required special techniques to display its color and rhythm. "Both Albéniz and Falla took the guitar as their instrumental model," she noted. "And this style has something to do with the same qualities that our great flamenco dancers have—it is the sense of excitement held tightly under control. There is no hysteria or flamboyance…. With this comes the quality of seduction, a certain arrogance or haughtiness."

The piano presented special challenges to Larrocha. At 4′9″, she was tiny. "She is so short and so small," wrote Rickenbacker, "that her elbow hardly reaches the top of the woodwork of a concert grand, even when she wears high heels. In order to get both hands into the upper reaches of the keyboard she has to turn her body to the audience and stretch her arms straight out." Her small hands and short fingers required constant exercise to stretch beyond a nine-key span, whereas almost all concert pianists could easily span at least ten keys. Marshall developed exercises especially for her. While Larrocha never dreamed of longer fingers, she wished for a broader span: "I am always doing Chopin études, always stretching. The hands are my obsession."

Perhaps in part because of her small hands, she carefully worked out the fingering of new pieces, adjusting it to fit her physical limitations and to make certain that the necessary finger was available for the desired tone. "For me," she explained, "the fingering is very important. I may decide on using a certain finger to produce a particular tone, but if it doesn't work, then I have to change the fingering accordingly. That's why I don't advocate practicing away from the piano as some pianists do; a decision on fingering may not be practical at the concert hall, and by that time it's a little late to change."

Perhaps her small size endeared her to audiences. Certainly Larrocha made no appeal to them through flamboyant behavior. Entering the stage on a typical evening, she acknowledged the audience with a smile and immediately sat at the keyboard, ready to begin. But her calm exuded controlled emotion, similar to the Spanish music for which she was so famous. Her sedate and self-effacing public persona belied a naturally pessimistic and moody inner self. She refused to be swept up by the public adulation, particularly in the U.S., because she feared that it might stop as quickly as it started. She disliked listening to her own recordings: "I am so moody that what pleases me today may seem intolerable tomorrow." Yet such emotions made travel attractive, as it brought new faces and locations.

At the height of her touring between 1965 and 1980, she usually played between 100 and 125 engagements per year. This included several months in the States and a few concerts in Latin America before she returned to Europe. Usually, she traveled alone, practicing whenever possible. Her manager arranged for a piano in her hotel room. To avoid disturbing other guests, she used a mute on the strings. When possible, she practiced at the Steinway headquarters in New York or Hamburg. In Barcelona, she played a pre-Civil War Bechstein, perfectly suited to her.

For Larrocha, playing with so many different conductors and orchestras sometimes interfered with the full expression of her artistry. She often had only two or three days to practice with an orchestra. Through intuitive sensitivity, great conductors adapted to her genius; with good conductors, she had less flexibility. Her travels also brought occasional master classes with aspiring pianists. Larrocha gave few of them because she considered them useless; in a single class, she felt she could not know the students or really help them understand her.

The passing years brought new honors. For a decade, she played annually at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival, the only musician to be such a constant presence. So great was her popularity in New York that she could easily sell out a stand of six or seven concerts. Particularly moving to Larrocha was her reception by an ecstatic audience in Barcelona in 1971. She had not performed publicly in her native city for seven years, and when she entered to play Chopin's Second Concerto, the crowd gave her an ovation before she played, something extremely rare in Spain. In 1977, Musical America, the classical-music monthly, named her its musician of the year and cited her command of the Spanish repertoire and her mastery of the classical keyboard. Two years later, she played all five of Beethoven's piano concertos with André Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony. That year, she also received the German Schallplatten Prize.

Despite her accomplishments, Larrocha remained surprisingly unaffected by her fame. As a private student, she had never participated in piano competitions, and that, Larrocha believed, made her less concerned with glory and wealth. Her real competition was with herself, to grow as a musician. More and more, she found her chief joy not in the applause of public performance but in the satisfaction of learning more about music and looking for something new in her own artistic abilities. She became a great pianist, in part, because she used her initial fame as an opportunity to expand her repertoire and to develop further as an artist.

Neither was she especially concerned about her rank among other pianists. Some critics such as Harold Schonberg saw her as an outstanding female pianist, but her virtuosity eventually made gender-based evaluations irrelevant. Unsurpassed in her renditions of complex, precise, delicate music, she also demonstrated artistic mastery of powerful, stormy pieces by Beethoven and Schubert. As Henahan of The New York Times observed: "Manly virility can become as great a bore in music as too much delicacy and poetic introspection. The 'greatest' pianists, no matter their sex, combine these and a universe of other qualities in their playing." To which he added, "There are, let us face it, few male pianists who play as strongly, let alone as fluently and accurately as de Larrocha." According to William Livingstone, in Stereo Review (1980), "the most outstanding characteristics of her playing are the unshakable rhythmic underpinning of all her interpretations and her uncanny ability to find a dance-like quality in whatever music she plays." Of the woman who gave Spanish piano music its international standing, Newsweek's Hubert Saal wrote in 1972: "Today, mentioning her in the same breath with Rubinstein or Horowitz raises no eyebrows."