Alberto Ginastera
composer
Alberto Ginastera, who grew up in a musical environment in Argentina, focused on the folk traditions of his country. The music of the Pampas remained a core element of his inspiration until his late work, although he also came into contact with the avant-garde of his time at an early stage through his intensive study of the music of Béla Bartók and the Second Viennese School.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1916 to Argentinian parents with Catalan and Italian roots, Ginastera studied piano and composition at the Conservatorio “Alberto Williams” and the Conservatorio Nacional in Buenos Aires from 1928 after early music lessons. Fascinated by Igor Stravinsky’s [Sacre du printemps] – Ginastera was attracted by the “primitiveness of the music, its dynamic impulse and the novelty of its language” – he composed his first official work, the ballet [Panambí] (1937), which established his reputation in Argentina: a piece based on an old legend of the indigenous Guaraní people and with its pulsating ostinati unmistakably echoes Stravinsky’s work of the century. In 1941, Ginastera composed his dance piece [Estancia] for Lincoln Kirstein and his American Ballet Caravan which, after the company was disbanded, was successfully premiered at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires with choreography by Georges Balanchine. At the same time, Ginastera’s thirty-year career as an influential teacher began with a position at the Liceo Militar General San Martín and a professorship at the Conservatorio Nacional, where he also taught composition privately. In 1962, he was appointed director of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, which became the central contact point for young Latin American composers. In 1971, Ginastera married his second wife, the Argentinian cellist Aurora Natola, and moved to Geneva with her, where he devoted himself entirely to composing from then on. When Ginastera died in 1983 as a result of cancer – in the final stages of his illness he had still been able to complete his Second and Third Piano Sonatas – he left behind a large number of unfinished works.
