Calle de Hilarión Eslava

Hilarión Eslava was born in Burlada, next to Pamplona, in 1807, and as a boy sang as a choirboy before becoming chapel master at El Burgo de Osma and then at Seville Cathedral. From those years came his Miserere, still heard every Holy Week beneath the cathedral’s vaults. In 1844 he settled in Madrid as master of the Royal Chapel, and later taught composition at the Conservatory, which he came to direct. His Método de solfeo trained generations of musicians for more than a century, and he gathered centuries of Spanish polyphony in the Lira Sacro-Hispana. On this street Benito Pérez Galdós, by then blind, lived and died on 4 January 1920. The writer spent his last years in a small Neo-Mudéjar house, where he wrote his final works.