Honoring `the Gershwin of Cuba'

By JAMES ROOS
Herald Music Critic

Concert halls are often adorned with the names of musical giants like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven or Brahms. But at Dade County Auditorium, which serves the world's largest Cuban community outside Cuba, an 11-foot-high marble monument memorializes just a single composer: Ernesto Lecuona, pride of the Cuban people.

The creator of Malagueña, Siboney and a dozen other world-famous hits, Lecuona, whose centenary is being celebrated, straddled both the pop and concert fields and is often described as ``the Gershwin of Cuba.'' As the creator of Rhapsody in Blue and Porgy and Bess drew inspiration from Afro-American music, Lecuona immortalized Afro-Cuban rhythms and song.

This is especially true of his ravishingly beautiful piano music, which Zenaida Manfugás, the famed Cuban-born virtuosa and friend of the composer (who died in 1963) will perform at 4 p.m. today in a centenary salute in the new Wertheim Center at Florida International University's Tamiami campus.

Prolific composer

Lecuona composed more than 700 works, including 400 songs, 170 piano pieces, 50 theater scores (mostly zarzuelas, a form of Spanish operetta), nearly 40 symphonic works, five ballets and about a dozen film scores.

But the piano music is getting the biggest boost from the centenary. The Swedish BIS label has released three CDs in a 6-disc series, played by American Thomas Tirino. The Elan label boasts two new releases, featuring Rodolfo Brito, a faculty member at Miami-Dade Community College, plus Cuban-born Santiago Rodríguez; while the Montilla label has produced a CD with Alfredo Munar.

And now comes today's recital by Manfugás.

A former protege of the legendary German pianist Walter Gieseking, Manfugás more often performs Schubert or Beethoven. But she also keeps Lecuona in her repertory because she idolized the man, who considered her among his best interpreters. ``There are two kinds of pianists,'' he said, ``those who happen to play the piano, and those who are born to play it. And Manfugás is among the latter.''

According to Marta Pérez, a soprano who in the late 1940s and '50s starred in such seductive Lecuona zarzuelas as Maria La O, says ``Zenaida has a way with the music that's close to Lecuona's own style.'' Her sweeping virtuosity evokes his fluent prowess at the keyboard.

Lecuona actually discovered Manfugás' talent firsthand.

Like the composer, she began playing the piano at 5, tossing off such showpieces as Gottschalk's capricious Pasquinade. But when she was introduced to Lecuona as a child prodigy, and he took her to meet a musical producer, the man disdainfully asked Lecuona, `` `Why do you bring me this little negrita [black girl]?' But when I sat down and started to play,'' she recalls, ``he changed his tune fast.''

Helped start careers

Manfugás is one of dozens of aspiring musicians whose careers Lecuona helped jump-start. Pérez, for instance, remembers that when ill health forced the maestro to cancel a 1962 appearance with her on the Ed Sullivan Show, Lecuona phoned Sullivan to make sure Pérez would still appear on the program -- which helped launch her American career.

Lecuona, after all, understood how urgently talent needs outlets. One of 14 children, his musical gift became evident when he was just 3 1/2, and his older sister, Ernestina, began giving him piano lessons at 5. He published his first piece at 11, a march and two-step called Cuba y América, adopted by Cuban military bands.

Not much later he was studying with the renowned Cuban master Joaquín Nin and at 15 graduated from Havana's National Conservatory with a gold medal. But even while attending school, Lecuona had already formed his own band. In fact, as a youngster, he performed in silent-movie houses and Havana cafes, wearing a borrowed pair of long trousers.

Rising star

By the time Lecuona arrived in New York at 17 to play a piano recital and record his music for Victor, he was a rising star in Cuba. And by the mid 1920s, after a brief stint studying with Ravel in France, he was touring the United States and Europe with his own band, later known as the Lecuona Cuban Boys. Its performances were largely responsible for popularizing the conga and the rumba in America in the '20s.

Cuba, of course, has produced other, far more complex composers, from Alejandro García Caturla to Amadeo Roldán and Julián Orbón. But Lecuona has dominated the mass market by successfully incorporating into his compositions both Spanish rhythms, with their combined 6/8-3/4 meters, and Afro-Cuban rhythms, with their syncopations in 2/4 time. But above all, his music is deeply rhapsodic and nostalgic.

``There is a wonderfully sensuous quality to Lecuona's melodies and an atmospheric richness about his music that I really love,'' says Plácido Domingo, who has recorded Lecuona songs, such as the torrid Siboney of 1929, which was once so popular it was jokingly called the Cuban national anthem. Even Dizzy Gillespie recorded his own version.

Lecuona's music also found its way to Hollywood, where as early as 1931 famed Metropolitan Opera baritone Lawrence Tibbett was singing with Lupe Vélez opposite Jimmy Durante in Cuban Love Song. El Manisero (The Peanut Vendor) was soon recorded, too, by none other than Louis Armstrong; and Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey popularized other Lecuona numbers.

Most famous work

But Malagueña is probably his most famous work. The malagueña is an old Spanish dance tune in rapid triple time that originated, as the name implies, in Malaga. Lecuona's incarnation of it has such instant and fiery Latin appeal it has become a perennial favorite since he introduced it at New York's Roxy Theater in 1927. For decades, Malagueña sold an average of 100,000 copies of sheet music every year in the United States alone.

Today, 33 years after Lecuona's death, his estate still is pumping out royalties to a dozen or so heirs. The composer's closest surviving relative, his nephew Juan Brouwer, who lives in Coral Gables, says ``Lecuona was always very generous to me and my wife and his relatives in Cuba; and he's still helping us. We are planning to move into a new house, and any day we're expecting a check from his estate in Spain that will help cover the down payment.''

More performances

Brouwer and his wife Olinde celebrated their engagement 45 years ago at Lecuona's ranch outside Havana and helped him settle in Miami, where he spent just a year in 1961 after immigrating first to Tampa, then moving to Spain in 1962. Until perhaps a decade ago, his music was seldom billed in Cuba, partly because he'd been friends with Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, who made him an official diplomatic representative of the country.

But in recent years, his works have received more and more performances and the Castro government has repeatedly requested that he be buried in Cuba, though his will forbids that until a democratic government is installed. For now, he remains entombed at a cemetery in Westchester, N.Y.

Says Brouwer, ``As a kid I remember Lecuona was always lots of fun to play with, and when I got older I realized he was also quite a practical joker. Though he was a bachelor with no children, he always seemed to be entertaining a house full of people. There was never any liquor in his home, but you could always count on a good cup of coffee.''

And a cigar or cigarette. For Lecuona was a heavy smoker whose fatal heart attack, at 68, was related to chronic emphysema.

With his big dark eyes, large figure and melancholic expression, the composer closely resembled actor Zero Mostel and loved the good life so much he never practiced enough to pursue a full-fledged career as a classical pianist. But Manfugás remembers him sizzling in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, and once he stormed through Saint-Saens' Second Piano Concerto with the Havana Symphony (which he co-founded).

Inspiration came easy

Lecuona was so averse to practicing that he seldom touched the piano even when composing piano music. Instead, he'd sit at a card table or play dominoes while jotting down the music as it poured out of him, making few, if any, changes.

Alfredo Munar, a pianist/arranger who has performed Lecuona's music his whole life and orchestrated his operetta Lola Cruz for a revival here last summer, says, ``What's remarkable about Lecuona is his incredible facility. He created one beautiful melody after another, like Gershwin. He was a fountain of inspiration, so spontaneous, and so casual about it.''

Lecuona heard music in his mind's ear so clearly he often sent compositions to his publishers without ever having played or heard them, except in his mind.

Some of this musical talent evidently runs in the family. For Ernestina, the sister who taught the composer piano, was reportedly quite gifted, and her grandson (Lecuona's great nephew), Leo Brouwer, is today one of Cuba's foremost composers, currently living in Spain, where he conducts the Cordoba Symphony. Also, Lecuona's niece, Margarita, was a mezzo-soprano and a prolific composer of, among other things, Babalú, which legendary Cuban vocalist Miguelito Valdés sang and recorded so often he became known as ``Mr. Babalú.''

As for Lecuona's indelible gift, though, perhaps there's a simple explanation for it. As the adage goes, ``Talent does what it can; genius does what it must.''

Copyright © 1996 The Miami Herald