Oscár de la Cinna : Souvenir de l’Alcazar de Séville, Op. 152

Oscár de la Cinna (1836-1906) was actually Hungarian by birth, and studied piano with Czerny. However, he travelled widely (for example, in 1854 he put on a concert in Stockholm), and visited Mallorca in 1866, subsequently marrying a local girl. After again living in various parts of Europe, he eventually settled in Seville. He had actually been to Seville in the 1850s where he attempted to introduce German repertoire, then little known there in a recital. He wrote much piano salon music - each piece with its own opus number. The music I have seen by him is all very well written, and Cinna seems to provide a musical bridge between the Spain of Bizet and Delibes, and that of Albeniz and Granados. This piece comes from a set of ’Six Pensées Poetiques’ - an album of detached pieces, each with separate opus numbers, published in Oslo around 1880, and dedicated to various eminent Scandinavian musicians, including Grieg. The dedicatee of this one is Johan Svendsen (1840-1911), who was born