(Sp. La Habana).
Capital of Cuba. Although founded on its present strategic site about 1519 and a key port for the defence of the Spanish Indies throughout the colonial period, Havana became the official capital only in 1607. It was already a city of 50,000 inhabitants when the diocese of Havana was created in 1787. Until then it lacked the kind of cathedral music establishment that gave Mexico City, Lima and La Plata (Sucre) their colonial fame. The first Havana musicians were adventurers; for instance: the Flemish drummer Juan de Emberas (‘of Antwerp’) who was being paid 36 ducats annually in 1557; the fife-and-drum players, three trumpeters, harpist, and players of viol and psaltery who left Havana on 10 February 1566 for Florida in Menéndez de Avilés’s ships. The music played in churches and at Corpus Christi celebrations is documented from the end of the 16th century, as is the establishment of councils and brotherhoods where the African population and their creole descendants met and where music and dance were cultivated. The celebration of Epiphany, with its parades by the guilds of the ‘Nation's Negroes’, provided one of the city's most typical scenes and gave rise to the Havana Carnival.
In 1605 Gonzalo de Silva became the city's first known music teacher, giving lessons in organ and singing, and in 1689 the first boys' choir was formed at the San Ambrosio school. The founding of several institutions in the 17th century, together with the economic development of Cuba's western region, stimulated the growth of cultural activity in the capital. The Real y Pontificia Universidad de La Habana, founded in 1728, was crucial in the development of Cuban intellectual life.
The most important ecclesiastical composer born in Havana before 1800 was Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803). His extant copies of works by Juan del Vado, Sebastián Durón, Juan Francisco Barrios and Melchor de Montemayor attest his acquaintance with Baroque literature of the peninsula. In 1796 Francisco Manuel Lazo de la Vega became maestro de capilla of Havana Cathedral. By 1850 a cathedral music archive of 623 works was amassed, including nine Haydn symphonies, many European sacred works, scores by Lazo de la Vega and by his successors Juan Nepomuceno Goetz, José Francisco Rensoli, Joaquín Gavira, and by the Havana Cathedral veteran Cayetano Pagueras.
On 12 October 1776 the first Havana playhouse, the Teatro Coliseo (renamed the Principal in 1803), opened with a Metastasio opera, Didone abbandonata (composer not known). On 24 October 1790 the first Spanish tonadilla, Pablo Esteve y Grimau’s El catalán y la buñuelera, was sung in Havana; between then and 1832, 200 more tonadillas were staged, the most popular of which was Blas de Laserna’s Isabela. After the tonadilla lost favour, the guaracha, sung with gourds, rattles, guitars and accordion, took its place. In October 1800 Iriarte’s melodrama Guzmán el Bueno was mounted in the Coliseo. On 25 January 1801 the Teatro del Circo opened with Grétry’s Zémire et Azor, followed by his Le tableau parlant, J.-F. Edelmann’s Ariane dans l’isle de Naxos, Gibert’s Les trois sultanes and Monsigny’s Le déserteur. The social dances then in favour in Havana were the minuet and contradanza. From 1811 to 1832 a local company gave 80 opera productions annually, including works of Paisiello, Cimarosa, Spontini and Rossini. Mozart’s Don Giovanni received its New World première at the Havana Teatro Principal on 3 November 1818, when the 18-piece orchestra was conducted by the local black maestro Ulpiano Estrada.
The first Cuban music periodical, published in Havana in 1812, was El Filarmónico Mensual. Music publishing was initiated in 1822 by a Frenchman, Santiago Lessieur. In 1832 the younger J.-F. Edelmann settled in Havana and founded in 1836 a music publishing house that issued morceaux caractéristiques by him and his Havana-born pupils Manuel Saumell Robredo (1817–70), Pablo Desvernine (1823–1910) and Fernando Arizti (1828–88). Around the mid-19th century numerous societies were founded, including the Liceo Artístico y Literario (1844–79), the Sociedad de Música Clásica (1866) and the Sociedad Filarmónica, which promoted solo and chamber concerts. While in Paris, Sebastián Iradier (1809–69) published the most successful habanera of the century, La paloma: canción americana (1859); it was approached in popularity only by his El arreglito (1864), quoted by Bizet. However, in the 1850s the zapateo and contradanza still remained the most popular society dances in Havana. Local musicians of African descent, such as Tomás Buelta y Flores (d 1844), excelled in contradanzas. The first artist to incorporate Cuban black drummers in a public concert in Havana was L.M. Gottschalk, who aroused frenzied enthusiasm when he played there in 1854, 1857 and 1859. His Havana friend Nicolás Ruiz Espadero (1832–90) became the most widely known Cuban composer of his generation through his miniatures published in Paris. At the close of the century the unrivalled master of the danza, Ignacio Cervantes Kawanag (1847–1905), headed a roster of Havana-born celebrities that included Claudio Brindis de Salas (1852–1911), Rafael Díaz Albertini (1857–1928), Cristóbal Martínez Corres (1822–72) and Gaspar Villate (1851–91). Villate was the first Havana-born composer to have an opera performed there (Zilia, 29 January 1881).
The Teatro de Tacón was inaugurated on 28 February 1838, and gave its first opera, Norma, the following year. Ernani, which opened the seasons of 1846–8, introduced Verdi to Cuban audiences. The first Spanish zarzuela to be sung there was Hernando’s El duende on 4 January 1853. On 31 January 1901 El náufrago received its première at the Tacón, with both music and a libretto based on Tennyson’s Enoch Arden by Eduardo Sánchez de Fuentes (1874–1944), who composed five other operas produced in Havana. Lacking Cuban indigenous melodies on which to base a symphonic work, Sánchez de Fuentes incorporated a Haitian melody in his grandiose Anacaona for chorus, orchestra and piano (1928). The first 20th-century Cuban symphonist to avail himself of African themes was Amadeo Roldán (1900–39); the other founder of Afro-Cuban musical nationalism was Alejandro García Caturla. Both profited from the ethnomusicological researches of the Havana-born anthropologist Fernando Ortíz. Gonzalo Roig (1890–1970), Ernesto Lecuona (1895–1965) and César Pérez Sentenat (1896–1973) reorganized the Havana SO in 1922.
In 1924 the Spanish musician Pedro Sanjuán (1886–1976) founded the Havana PO, which was directed by Roldán from 1930 until his death in 1939. Established in 1918, for more than half a century the Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical was the foremost promoter of concerts in the country, bringing to the stage of the Teatro Auditorium (later renamed the Teatro Amadeo Roldán) internationally renowned soloists such as Menuhin, Heifetz, Rubinstein and Casals. Alongside the orchestras and other institutions dedicated to promoting concert music, the Sociedad Coral de La Habana (Havana Choral Society) was also prominent. Directed by María Muñoz de Quevedo, it was responsible for the premières of many choral works, especially in the 1930s. Havana remained on the touring itinerary of various opera, ballet and zarzuela companies, and musicians such as Erich Kleiber, Juan José Castro, Koussevitzky, Monteux, Ansermet and Stravinsky (conducting mainly his own works) were invited to conduct the Havana PO. In 1934 José Ardévol founded the Havana Chamber Orchestra (Orquesta de Cámara de La Habana), which for over 20 years performed music by native composers, the Baroque and Classical repertory and, above all, numerous 20th-century works.
After numerous attempts, the first systematically organized conservatory was founded in Havana in 1885 by Hubert de Blanck. In 1899 Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade founded a rival Conservatorio de Música y Declamación, thus initiating a prolonged ‘war of conservatories’ that ended only in 1935 with the reform of the so-called Conservatorio Municipal. The Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana was founded in 1903 by Guillermo M. Tomás (1868–1933), and until 1959 it was the only free music school. In the 1940s it saw the founding of the Grupo de Renovación Musical, directed by Ardévol; the birth of the specialist magazines Conservatorio and La Música; and the emergence of the Sociedad Cultural Nuestra Tiempo (1951–61), under the presidency of Harold Gramatges, whose objective was to disseminate the newest trends in contemporary culture.
After 1959 free instruction in music was extended to several institutions, not only in the capital, but throughout the country. The Escuela Nacional de Arte, which became the centre for music and the other arts, was founded in Havana in 1962, and professional training continued at the Conservatorio Municipal (later renamed the Conservatorio Amadeo Roldán). The musical vanguard gathered strength in the 1960s, led by the composers Leo Brouwer, Juan Blanco and Carlos Fariñas and the conductor Duchesne Cuzán. Works by both Cuban and foreign composers were performed which incorporated such compositional devices as serialism, aleatory techniques and electro-acoustics. Three important institutions were founded in Havana in the 1970s and 80s: the Instituto Superior de Arte (1976), whose music faculty offers courses in practical music-making, musicology and composition; the Estudio Electroacústico (1977) at the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos, directed by Juan Blanco, which in 1990 became the Laboratorio Nacional de Música Electroacústica; and the Estudio de Música Electroacústica y por Computadoras, created at the Instituto Superior de Arte in 1989 and directed by Carlos Fariñas.
Havana is the home of most of Cuba's performing institutions, notably the National SO (founded in 1960), the Coro Nacional (1960), the main dance companies – Cuban National Ballet, Danza Contemporánea and Conjunto Folklórico Nacional – and the national opera company, the Teatro Nacional Lírico. The city also contains several institutions devoted to musical heritage and research, such as the Museo Nacional de la Música, the Centro de Información y Documentación Musical Odilio Urfé and the Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Música Cubana. Similarly, the majority of Cuba's competitions and festivals linked to both popular and serious music are held in Havana. Among the longest-established festivals are the Festival de Guitarra, directed by Leo Brouwer; the Festival de Música Contemporánea, sponsored by the Musicians' Association of the Cuban Writers' and Artists' Union; and the Festival de Jazz, organized by the Instituto Cubano de la Música.
S. Ramírez: La Habana artística (Havana, 1891)
A. León: Conservatorio municipal de música de La Habana (Havana, 1941)
E.T. Tolón and J.A. González: Óperas cubanas y sus autores (Havana, 1943)
A. Carpentier: La música en Cuba (Mexico City, 1946, 3/1988)
J.A. González: ‘Fué en Cuba donde se estrenó, en América, la ópera “Don Juan” de Mozart’, Revista de música, i (1960), 100–03
J. González: ‘Habana 1800: su pequeño mundo musical: crónicas de ‘El Regañón de la Havana’’, Revista de música, ii (1961), 36–45
Z. Lapique Becali: ‘Un periódico musical en Cuba: el filarmónico mensual’, Revista de música, ii (1961), 206–27
E. Martín: Panorama histórico de la música en Cuba (Havana, 1971)
R. Stevenson: A Guide to Caribbean Music History (Lima, 1975) [bibliography]
Z. Lapique Bercalí: Música colonial cubana en las publicaciones periódicas (1812–1902) (Havana, 1979)
G. Antolitía: Cuba: dos siglos de música (siglos XVI y XVII) (Havana, 1984)
V. Eli and Z. Gómez: … haciendo música cubana (Havana, 1989)
ROBERT STEVENSON/VICTORIA ELI RODRÍGUEZ