Faustino de Jesús Nicolás Ruiz Espadero

Composer and virtuoso pianist. Considered the most important Romantic performer of Cuban music.

He was born in La Habana. He began his musical studies through the teachings of his mother, Dolores Espadero (1790-1885) – a notable pianist from Extremadura who mastered the classical repertoire, especially the works of Beethoven.

In 1856, he was appointed music professor at the Liceo Artístico y Literario de La Habana, where Manuel Saumell, Narciso Téllez, and the Edelmann brothers worked, sons of Juan Federico Edelmann, who opened, in 1836, an instrument store and the first important music publishing house that La Habana had.

In 1854, he met the very famous American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), who traveled to Cuba on several occasions to give concerts. From then on, both musicians developed a close friendship, from which an extensive correspondence remained that reveals aesthetic points of contact between two creators who, in their lived experience, had very little in common.

Starting in 1859, the year he resigned from his position at the Liceo, Ruiz Espadero performed alongside Gottschalk in his presentations in Cuba and gave concerts, also with José White, Pablo Desvernine, Fernando Arizti, and others. By then, he had composed his eight Contradanzas (of which seven are preserved), which announce a clear nationalist character in opposition to the classical forms that 19th-century Romantic composers cultivated.

Espadero's contradanzas employ different rhythmic motifs that appear in various proportions in those written by Saumell and, later, in the danzas of Ignacio Cervantes.

Around 1860, he obtained international recognition when Firth Pond & Co. of Nueva York, together with Casa Edelmann, published Ombre et Mystére and, the following year, Escudier in París published four of his piano works.

In 1861, he participated in the Cuban premiere of a symphony by Gottschalk (the third), titled Una noche en el trópico, on the stage of the Teatro Tacón. In the absence of an orchestra, forty pianists were convened (among them, Saumell, Desvernine, Edelmann, Laureano Fuentes, and Cervantes, his most famous student who at that time was fourteen years old), plus a substantial percussion group from Santiago de Cuba, presided by the king of the cabildo of French blacks, an unusual occurrence at the time, to perform "authentic Creole rhythms". Nothing like it had been seen and heard on the Cuban musical stage until the arrival of Amadeo Roldán, many years later.

Espadero's works were performed in Cuba and abroad; he participated in everything related to the promotion of music, especially the Classical Music Sessions, organized in La Habana by Serafín Ramírez. From 1868 onward, his artistic activities were reduced by the tensions caused by the outbreak of the War of Independence, although he performed alongside Cervantes and Serafín Ramírez in the staging of Gounod's opera Fausto in April of 1871.

As a composer, he was deeply imbued with the virtuosic tradition of 19th-century Europe, a fact demonstrated in the words he wrote as an introduction to Gottschalk's piano works, published posthumously in París: "We believe that the great and the beautiful should be clothed in new, unforeseen forms, taken from what sentiment has of infinite and inexhaustible nature. In matters of art, moreover, form is, in our opinion, secondary; thought is everything. What does the setting matter if the stone is precious?"

The spirit that characterizes the best-known period of Espadero's work is expressed simply by citing his titles: Vals satánico, Tarantela furiosa, El lamento del poeta, Canto del alma, La caída de las hojas, Recuerdos de antaño…

Even his Chant du Guajiro (opus 61), "grande scéne caracteristique cubaine," published in París in 1874, shows marked interest in the striking and the pianistic effect, expressed above all in a coda that, according to Alejo Carpentier, is where Espadero succumbs, once again, under the weight of the taste of the day, writing an ending of transcendental execution, with great profusion of brilliant chords, sudden tremolos, and a concluding phrase that has nothing to do, in its character, with what came before.

The works he wrote in his final years – a Scherzo, a Sonata, several Etudes, and a Trio – nonetheless reveal perhaps an awareness of the harmful examples that weakened his earlier, more ambitious compositions. By that time, his morbid aversion to performing in public had intensified; he distanced himself from his colleagues, reproaching them "for not having created a serious institution for musical education" and had few students left, among them the notable pianist Angelina Sicouret.

Espadero was a first-rate performer, capable of successfully approaching all styles, but he was not content to be merely a pianist and sacrificed the interpreter for the composer. An accident that caused him serious burns cut short his life when his creative work seemed to be choosing new and more peaceful directions. Almost all of his final works remained unpublished.

Source: En Caribe.org