1876–1946 Spanish composer. He studied with Felipe Pedrell and conceived a powerful musical nationalism. His first major work was the opera La vida breve (1905). He lived in Paris (1907 – 14), where he absorbed the music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others. The intensely Spanish ballet El amor brujo (1915) gained him further acclaim. The Spanish Civil War caused him to leave Spain for Argentina c. 1938, and he never returned. His other works include Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1915), The Three-Cornered Hat (1919), the puppet opera El retablo de maese Pedro (1923; with Federico García Lorca), a harpsichord concerto (1926), and the huge unfinished oratorio L'Atlántida. He is regarded as the greatest Spanish composer of the 20th century.

Manuel de Falla is a representative of a group of Spanish composers who won international recognition. He was born in 1876 in Cádiz, where he first studied, moving later to Madrid and then to Paris, but returning to Madrid when war broke out in 1914. Strongly influenced by the traditional Andalusian cante jondo, he settled in Granada, where his friends included the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The Civil War of 1936 found de Falla neutral in the struggle, but in 1939 he moved to Buenos Aires, where he continued work on his ambitious stage-work Atlántida, which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1946.