Calle del Maestro Villa

A street opened in the early twentieth century to link the Cava de San Miguel with the Plaza del Conde de Barajas, deep in the Habsburg quarter. It is one of the short, narrow ones, born with the sole task of stitching the city together. Since 1941 it honours Ricardo Villa González, born in 1871, orphaned at ten and a child of prodigious ear: a solfège prize at eleven, first prize in violin in 1898, and conductor of the Teatro Real orchestra in 1905. His greatest work was the Madrid Municipal Band, which he founded and premiered on 2 June 1909 at the Teatro Español, to resounding success. He gave it an almost symphonic body, rare among the bands of the day. Villa believed in open-air, free music: from 1909 he organised concerts in the Retiro, a custom still alive. There is a Plaza del Maestro Villa there where the Band plays on Sundays, just as he began.

In July 1900, during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, the conductor of the orchestra accompanying Pablo Sarasate fell gravely ill three days before the concert. Sarasate asked the orchestra whether anyone dared to conduct. Villa, then a violinist in the ensemble, offered. Sarasate looked at him skeptically given his short stature, but after the rehearsal he changed his mind and told him: “You can now go about the world on your own as an orchestra conductor.” The episode, reported by the musical press of the time and by the biography published on radiobanda.com, marked the start of a professional and personal relationship between the two musicians that lasted several years.