Ernestina Lecuona Casado

She was born in the city of Matanzas, where she spent her first childhood years.

When she was still a child, her family settled in the Cuban capital, where she began her piano studies at the Academia del Centro Asturiano with Antonio Planas, and later perfected them under the supervision of Madame Calderón, a graduate of the Conservatorio de París.

In 1897, at the age of 15, she composed her first work: the habanera Luisa, which was published by Anselmo López's publishing house and was widely distributed in Cuba and Spain. Around that time she began teaching music and piano to her younger brother, Ernesto, who would later dedicate some of his creations to her, including Danza negra.

While still very young, she married Juan Bautista Brouwer Etchecopar, a doctor of Franco-Dutch origin who came to Cuba at the end of the 19th century and worked as a professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of La Habana in the first half of the past century. They had four children: Elisa, Julieta, Ángel, and Juan, father of guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer.

Raising them forced her to abandon her musical work for a long time. Her piano was placed at the service of Ernesto Lecuona, and she and her husband supported his studies and initial career as a concert pianist.

Once her descendants were established, alongside her brother—who was then at the height of his popularity as a pianist and composer—in 1928, Ernestina Lecuona resumed her work as a composer, instrumentalist, and accompanist for prestigious national and foreign lyrical singers on radio stations and in theaters. That year she introduced the bolero Anhelo besarte, which was quickly followed by a criolla premiered in Havana by Italian tenor Leo Micheluzzi: ¿Me odias?, a response to Te odio, by Cuban writer and composer Félix B. Caignet.

From that point on, the list of her waltzes, criollas, boleros, songs, congas, danzas, and guajiras would grow, which in various cases would transcend throughout Hispanic America and the United States.

Apart from the aforementioned scores, among other highly impactful ones were Jardín azul, Ahora que eres mía, Cierra, cierra los ojos, Cuando duermes, Junto al río, Ya que te vas, Te has cansado de mi amor, Dame otro beso, Sólo a ti te quiero, Bésame con ternura, Tú serás en mis noches, ¿Por qué no me quieres?, No lo dudes.

Besides her own lyrics, she used verses from Cubans Gustavo Sánchez Galarraga, Mary Morandeyra, Esther Costales, Celia Pérez Belinchón, Rosa A. Cohalla, Luis Ángel de la Cruz Muñoz, Arturo Alfonso Roselló, Ernesto Montaner and from Argentines Raquel Abrisqueta and Juan Clauso in her pieces.

Several of her musical compositions were notably performed by Esther Borja, Juan Arvizu, Pedro Vargas, Tito Guízar, Pilar Arcos, Margarita Cueto, Rita Montaner, Adolfo Utrera, Miguel de Grandy, Hortensia Coalla, Maruja González, Tomasita Núñez, Fernando Albuerne, Daniel Arroyo, Mercedes Simone, Tito Coral.

Ernestina accompanied her brother on tours to Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and the United States, in which they repeatedly performed four-hand pieces on radio stations and in concert halls.

Among other examples, noteworthy was her performance at the Cuban music concert organized in 1948 by Ernesto Lecuona at Carnegie Hall.

Between December 11 and 17, 1936, she presented several of her compositions at the Cervantes theater in New York, with the collaboration of Mexican soprano Margarita Cueto, and during that period she accompanied on piano her song Cierra, cierra los ojos to Tito Guízar, a tenor of that same nationality, on the NBC radio station.

She participated alongside maestro Lecuona in numerous concerts of typical Cuban music sponsored by him in Cuba, in which Ernestina Lecuona premiered a good part of her creations.

On February 7, 1937, she organized a recital of that kind—at the Alkazar theater—for which she founded and directed from the piano her Female Concert Orchestra, made up of twelve professors. As she declared five years later to the magazine Carteles, this group could not become permanently established because of "the poverty of the artistic environment of that time."

She became a member of SADAIC, Sociedad Argentina de Autores y Compositores, and in 1942 was proclaimed "Hija Eminente de Matanzas."

In 1957—six years after Ernestina Lecuona's death—Esther Borja, her finest interpreter, recorded for the Kubaney label a long-playing record that included ten compositions by the composer, two of them instrumental, accompanied by the String Orchestra of maestro Humberto Suárez, who arranged the music.

Ernestina's death, which occurred exactly on September 3, 1951, brought about one of the saddest periods in Ernesto Lecuona's life. Motivated by a kind of maternal love, Ernestina always put aside her professional merits and personal glory to enjoy the successes of her younger brother. She was his incomparable guide and confidante, the one who dispelled the discouragements from artistic or sentimental failures, the one who on so many occasions knew how to guide him toward the most favorable paths, the one who remained at his side in moments of illness, when some friends from the days of triumph would distance themselves.

A few days after his burial, it was stated in a chronicle published in Carteles:
"With Ernestina Lecuona goes not only the artist, but fifty years of Cuban life, of musical environment, from a still romantic Havana, which in the silence of twilight learned its music lesson just as in the poet's verses; a Havana of flowered walls and flamboyants that reddened the sky of dusk, and which in the calm of night gathered around the family piano to hear the song with the blue glimmers of fireflies and Siboney cadences.

And so, as Ernestina Lecuona's coffin was closed, it was like that black lid of the piano that falls over the keyboard when the melody has ended.