Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga - String Quartet No. 1 in D minor

Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga

Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio de Arriaga y Balzola (January 27, 1806 – January 17, 1826) was a Spanish Basque composer. He was nicknamed "the Spanish Mozart" after he died, because, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he was both a child prodigy and an accomplished composer who died young. They also shared the same first and second baptismal names; and they shared the same birthday, January 27 (fifty years apart).
Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga was born in Bilbao, Biscay, on what would have been Mozart's fiftieth birthday. His father (Juan Simón de Arriaga) and the boy's older brother first taught him music. Juan Simón had some musical talent and at age seventeen Juan Crisóstomo was an organist at a church in Berriatúa. Juan Simón worked in Guernica and in 1804 moved to Bilbao and became a merchant in wool, rice, wax, coffee and other commodities. The income generated in this way allowed Juan Simón to think about providing his son, who had shown prodigious musical talent, a way of developing those gifts.
In September 1821 Arriaga's father, with the encouragement of composer José Sobejano y Ayala (1791–1857), sent Juan Crisóstomo to Paris, where in November of that year Arriaga began his studies. These included violin under Pierre Baillot, counterpoint with Luigi Cherubini and harmony under François-Joseph Fétis at the Paris Conservatoire. From all evidence, Arriaga made quite an impression on his teachers. In 1823, Cherubini, who had become director at the Conservatoire the previous year, famously asked on hearing the young composer's Stabat Mater, "Who wrote this?" and learning it was Arriaga, said to him, "Amazing – you are music itself."
Arriaga soon became a teaching assistant in Fétis's class, noted and highly praised both by fellow students and other faculty at the Conservatoire for his talent. Cherubini referred to Arriaga's fugue for eight voices (lost) based on the Credo ... et vitam venturi simply as "a masterpiece", and Fétis was no less effusive — apparently, what impressed all his mentors was his use of sophisticated harmonies, counterpoint and fugue with minimal or no formal instruction. Fétis was already familiar with Arriaga's now-lost opera Los Esclavos Felices ("The Happy Slaves"),stating that "without any knowledge whatsoever of harmony, Juan Crisóstomo wrote a Spanish opera containing wonderful and completely original ideas." Arriaga was well supported during his four years in Paris by his father, but the intensity of his commitment to his studies at the Conservatoire and his meteoric rise, based on his teachers' compliments and assessments of his promise, may have taken a toll on his health: he died in Paris ten days before his twentieth birthday, of a lung ailment (possibly tuberculosis), or exhaustion, perhaps both. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the Cimetière du Nord in Montmartre. Thanks to the Spanish Embassy, since 1977 there has been a plaque marking the house at 314 rue Saint-Honoré in memory of the composer.
String Quartet No. 1 in D minor
I. Allegro
II. Adagio con espressione
III. Minuetto Allegro
IV. Adagio Allegretto

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