Blas de Laserna Nieva (1751 in Corella,

Navarra Navarre ( ; ; ), officially the Chartered Community of Navarre, is a landlocked foral autonomous community and province in northern Spain, bordering the Basque Autonomous Community, La Rioja, and Aragon in Spain and New Aquitaine in France. ...

– 1816 in

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

) was a Spanish composer.

Biography

Laserna was one of the most prolific and popular songwriters of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

. As an educator, he championed traditional Spanish musical forms, but as a theatrical impresario gave in to the public taste for Italian forms. He composed several operas and concertos, as well as incidental music for several comedies in the popular Spanish theater. A prolific songwriter, his creative oeuvre contains more than five hundred songs ( tonadillas), many with lyrics by

Ramón de la Cruz Ramón de la Cruz (28 March 1731 – 5 March 1794) was a Spanish neoclassical dramatist. Born in Madrid, he was a clerk in the ministry of finance. He is the author of nearly 400 ''sainete A sainete (farce or titbit) was a popular Spanish com ...

. While Conductor of the orchestra of the Teatro de la Cruz, he premiered his

operetta Operetta is a form of theatre and a genre of light opera. It includes spoken dialogue, songs and including dances. It is lighter than opera in terms of its music, orchestral size, and length of the work. Apart from its shorter length, the oper ...

, ''La Gitanilla Por Amor'' (''The Gypsy Girl For Love''), in 1791. Enrique Granados used the melody from his "La Tirana del Tripili" as the basis for "Los Requiebros" in his Goyescas suite.

References

External links

* 1751 births 1816 deaths 18th-century Spanish classical composers 18th-century Spanish male musicians 18th-century conductors (music) 19th-century Spanish classical composers 19th-century Spanish conductors (music) Spanish Classical-period composers Spanish opera composers Spanish conductors (music) Spanish male opera composers Spanish male conductors (music) Musicians from Madrid Musicians from Navarre {{Spain-composer-stub