La vida breve (opera)

La vida breve (Spanish: Life is Short or The Brief Life) is a two-act, four-scene opera that Manuel de Falla composed between August 1904 and March 1905 in Spain. The libretto, written by Carlos Fernández-Shaw, is set in Granada and uses the local language, Andalusian Spanish. Unable to secure its premiere in Spain, Falla continued revising the score after moving to France.

The premiere was given (in a French translation by Paul Millet) at the Casino Municipal in Nice on 1 April 1913. Paris and Madrid performances followed, later in 1913 and in 1914 respectively. Claude Debussy played a major role in influencing Falla to transform it from the number opera it was at its Nice premiere to an opera with a more continuous musical texture and more mature orchestration. This revision was first heard at the Paris premiere at the Opéra-Comique in December 1913, and is the standard version.

Only an hour long, the opera is usually paired with another work in performance. For example, the English opera company Opera North gave an opportunity for it to be heard alongside Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg or Puccini's Il tabarro when they included among the short operas ('Eight Little Greats') which were performed in their 2003/2004 season.

The complete opera is seldom performed today, even though its importance in the context of opera in Spanish is recognised and it was programmed for the reopening of the Teatro Real in 1997. However, its orchestral sections are often performed, especially the act 2 music published as Interlude and Dance, which is popular at concerts of Spanish music. (Fritz Kreisler in 1926 arranged for violin and piano the dance from this pairing under the spurious title Danse espagnole.) Indeed the opera is unusual for having nearly as much instrumental music as vocal: act 1, scene 2 consists entirely of a short symphonic poem (with distant voices) called Intermedio, depicting sunset in Granada; act 2, Scene 1 includes the above-referenced Danza and Interludio, with the latter ending the scene, i.e. in the opposite sequence to the excerpted pairing; and act 2, scene 2 begins with the a second and longer Danza (with vocal punctuation).

The role of Salud is central to the action. It has been sung by, among others, soprano Victoria de los Ángeles, mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza, mezzo Martha Senn, and, more recently, sopranos Cristina Gallardo-Domâs and Mary Plazas.