Ernesto Lecuona was one of those men that got an honorary position within the history of the Cuban music.

He was born in one of the most authentic towns of Havana, Guanabacoa, like relevant personalities such as Rita Montaner and Bola de Nieve. Ernesto Sixto Lecuona Casado was the first name of this Cuban man, song of a Spanish journalist that emigrated to Cuba and a woman from Matanzas. It is said that he gave his first concert when he was five years old.

When he was a child he used to accompany the silent films on the piano showed in the old cinema Testar. At the age of 12 he showed to his father his first classic work La Comparsa and he was not the only one amazed but all his generation.

When he was 17 years old he was graduated as professor of Piano and Music Theory. He won the first prize and gold medal unanimously in the Conservatorio Nacional de la Habana after being taught by acclaimed professors like Hubert de Blanck. Later, he went to Paris to improve his musical studies and he auditioned before the staff of the city conservatory.
At the end of his performance the director of that institution asked him: "Did you come to improve your studies or to work as professor?"
Ernesto Lecuona left a valuable treasure for the musical patrimony of this island. His composition reached 600 songs among them we have, Noche azul" and "Siboney"; 70 dances, several waltzes, zarzuelas, comedy sketches, operettas. He left his only opera "El sombrero de Yarey" without being showed. His music had a central role in the cinema not only in Cuban films but also in Argentine, Mexico and United States etc.
His close friends always referred to his unique natural gifts like the relaxation and flexibility and his unforgettable left hand, especially, in the performance of dances.
He was not only pianist and composer but also conductor of orchestra. His production was marked by the demonstration of relevant characteristics like his immediate, convincing and sometimes obsessed communication. His great creativity showed even in the simplest expressions, the perfect mixture of concert music with popular rhythms from Cuba, Spain as if he were a genuine Spanish and from many other countries.
We can find also in his works the originality of his personal language, the difficult interpretation, the intuition of distinguishing the most important moment in the music to express certain action in the stage and the synthesis in his works for the theater, especially his zarzuelas, genre for which he is considered one of its greater creators in the Hispanic world and the most important author in Cuba.
Lecuona was at the same time a humble and simple man, far from politics. A very genuine Cuban in his likes and today in Malaga, Spain, there is a street with his name. He was, thanks to his legitimacy, a universal Cuban man.

(Cubaheadlines.com)