Ricardo Castro: A Guide to the Composer’s Life and Works

Ricardo Castro was a late nineteenth-century romantic composer who was born at the Hacienda de Santa Bárbara in Durango, Mexico, as Rafael de la Santísima Trinidad Castro Herrera. By the age of fifteen, he enrolled in Mexico’s Conservatorio Nacional de Música (National Conservatory of Music). The Mexican composer Julio Ituarte was his piano teacher and, after a series of classes with him and other luminaries, he graduated from the school of music on an accelerated track.

Castro wrote both the first piano concerto and cello concerto to come out of Mexico. When he was only nineteen, Mexico also sent some of his work to Venezuela so that performers could play it for the hundredth birthday celebration of the deceased Latin American leader Simón Bolivar.

Throughout the course of his life, Castro toured and taught everywhere from New York to Leipzig. He studied under another famed Latin American pianist and composer, Teresa Carreño, while in Europe. He died in his early forties from pneumonia.

Ricardo Castro left behind a host of concertos, symphonies, and other compositions heavily influenced by the romantic period. The poignant nocturnes of Frédéric Chopin, flashy rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, and harmonious symphonies of Franz Schubert all inspired Castro’s work. Although he had only tangential external links to Europe, there was far more of that continent’s style in his work than that of his native Mexico’s music. Here are three significant examples of Castro’s work:

1. 1. “Allegro in A Major”: This frilly and upbeat allegro is an excellent example of Liszt’s influence in Castro’s work. It’s a short but impactful composition harkening back to the romantic period of which both men were a product.
2. 2. Atzimba: Atzimba was Castro’s first opera. Only its first act has remained; its second has been lost to time.
3. 3. “First Symphony in C Minor”: Castro completed his “First Symphony in C Minor” before his twentieth birthday. Its minor key alternates between brooding sounds of triumph and moments of melancholy.

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