Composer Marisa Manchado, 70, dies in Urda train collision in Spain

Confirmation after the Urda collision

The Madrid Composers' Association (AMCC) confirmed the death of Marisa Manchado, 70, its founding member and first president, in a statement issued on Saturday, 31 October. She was one of the victims of the collision between two trains at Urda, in the province of Toledo, on 28 October. Europa Press reported at least 69 deaths in the crash in its coverage of 31 October. According to the association, she had been travelling to Seville to take part in a meeting organised by the Faculty of Education Sciences of the University of Seville. El Mundo said the meeting was scheduled for the morning the trains collided, a Wednesday, and that she had been among the people still missing before the confirmation.

A career in contemporary Spanish music

Manchado wrote more than 150 works across pedagogical, chamber, vocal, symphonic, operatic and electroacoustic music. Her opera Cristal de agua fría, with a libretto by Rosa Montero, premiered in the 1993-1994 season. The Teatro Real described La Regenta, based on the novel by Leopoldo Alas, known as Clarín, and with a libretto by Amelia Valcárcel, as her third opera. Its 2023 premiere was a co-production of the Teatro Real and the Teatro Español, and the work was nominated for the International Opera Awards as best international premiere of 2023. In 2024 it earned her the National Music Prize in opera composition, and El País reported that she was due to receive the award on 15 December.

Her other posts included vice-director of the Conservatorio Teresa Berganza from 2001 until her retirement in 2018, and deputy director-general of music and dance at INAEM in 2007 and 2008, according to El Mundo. Her 2012 work Notas para la paz, a concerto for bassoon and orchestra, was commissioned by the Orquesta Nacional de España. She trained at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música in Madrid, took a postgraduate course in computer-assisted composition at Paris VIII, and earned a doctorate in musicology at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Advocacy for women in music

The Teatro Real praised her role in Spanish music in these words:

“A reference point in Spain for her constant work to vindicate and make visible the role of women in musical creation, where she opened the way for later generations.”

In 1982 she founded the radio programme Mujeres en la Música on Radio Nacional de España, and in 1998 she published an essay regarded as a reference work. She was also a pianist who trained in Madrid, Paris, Rome, Turin and Darmstadt. The jury for the National Music Prize said the opera gave voice to an iconic female character, a choice that reflected her long commitment to equality.

The association said that members who shared its work with her would remember her as a colleague who believed in uniting composers, and that they would carry forward the project she helped found more than a quarter century ago.

“Those of us who shared the AMCC path with her will remember, above titles and awards, the colleague who believed in the need to unite.”

A personal tribute in El País by a fellow composer recalled a companionship that began in 1978, when the two of them went together to Luis de Pablo to ask for composition lessons. The writer said she became deputy director of music at INAEM, a post that placed her formally above him, and described her as a pioneer of the feminist cause in classical music.