Calle Federico Moreno Torroba

Born in Madrid in 1891, Federico Moreno Torroba grew up surrounded by music: his father was an organist and conductor at the Teatro Lara, where together they premiered his first lyric work when Federico was twenty-one. From that start came an enormous catalog of zarzuelas, peaking with Luisa Fernanda (1932), performed thousands of times inside and outside Spain. But Moreno Torroba reigned in two fields at once. When a young Andrés Segovia asked the composers of his time for new pieces for guitar, Torroba was among the first to answer, with a Nocturno and a Suite castellana that entered the instrument’s modern repertoire. It is said that Victoria Kamhi once reminded her husband, Joaquín Rodrigo, that Torroba had never written a Concierto de Aranjuez; Rodrigo admitted it, and added that he had never composed a Luisa Fernanda either. The calle de Federico Moreno Torroba bears his name in the Adelfas neighborhood.