Enrique de Marchena y Dujarric, born in Santo Domingo on 13 October 1908 and died there in 1988, was a Dominican composer, pianist, lawyer, writer and diplomat whose music was built on the aesthetics of French Impressionism.

Training

He took his first piano lessons at ten from Flérida de Nolasco and studied solfège and theory at the Liceo Musical under José de Jesús Ravelo. As a teenager he played piano at the Cine Colón, accompanying silent films, and composed his first work, the waltz «Ella», at sixteen; he later considered «Vals en sol» his real starting point as a composer. In 1929 he earned a law degree from the Universidad de Santo Domingo.

Building the institutions

He played horn in the founding lineup of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Santo Domingo in 1932 and, by his own dictionary entry, was one of the principal founders of the Sociedad Pro-Arte in 1937. From 1929 until the end of his life he wrote music criticism for Listín Diario, alongside a parallel career teaching law.

A catalogue in the Impressionist mode

His catalogue of more than ninety works — identified stylistically with Debussy — includes the piano pieces «Debussyenne», «Claro de Luna» and «Reverie», the symphonic poem «Arco Iris» (awarded at the 1944 music competition marking the centennial of the Republic), a divertimento for strings and harp, and a concertino for flute and orchestra. Of his twenty-seven love songs, twelve won the top honor of the Premio Nacional de Música José Reyes jury in 1979, and his choral suite «Hebraicum» won the same prize in 1982.

Diplomat and writer

He served as Dominican ambassador to Washington from 1947 to 1954 and as delegate to the United Nations, then as ambassador to Bonn and Switzerland from 1966 to 1969. A member of the Academia Dominicana de la Lengua, he also wrote on Dominican folklore, including the 1942 essay «Del areíto de Anacaona al poema folklórico», and was decorated by both Germany and Spain, receiving Spain’s Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic and, in 1955, its Grand Cross of the Civil Order of Alfonso X the Wise.

Legacy

Composer, critic, law professor and career diplomat all at once, Enrique de Marchena spent six decades making the case, in concert halls and in print, that Santo Domingo’s musical life belonged in conversation with Paris and Vienna as much as with its own popular tradition.