Manuel Quiroga (violinist)

Manuel Quiroga (15 April 1892 – 19 April 1961) was a noted Galician violinist of the early 20th Century, whose career was cut short by a traffic accident in New York in 1937. He was repeatedly billed by music critics as "the finest successor of Pablo de Sarasate", and he is sometimes referred to as "Sarasate's spiritual heir".Enrique Granados, Eugène Ysaÿe and other composers dedicated compositions to him. The greatest violinists of the time – Ysaÿe, Fritz Kreisler, George Enescu, Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz – as well as composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Jean Sibelius, held Quiroga's artistry in great regard.Guilhermina Suggia, the Portuguese cellist (and one-time companion of Pablo Casals), described his playing of Tartini's Devil's Trill Sonata as "marvellous and flawless".

Quiroga was also a composer of two violin concertos, sets of variations, studies and smaller violin pieces, and cadenzas to major concertos from the core repertoire. He was the first to extensively use Galician nationalistic folklore as the basis of classical music compositions, and he was also a respected caricaturist and portraitist in oil and charcoal.

Quiroga has not had the ongoing recognition outside his native land that he perhaps deserves. His career was halted prematurely, before he had made a significant body of recordings, and shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, his legacy has been preserved in Galicia, and is being brought back to international attention.

Manuel Quiroga Losada was born in Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain in 1892. His first study of the violin was with a local amateur named Juan Sayago. He then moved on to a more qualified teacher, Benito Medal. He gave his first public concert in 1900, at the age of 8. He gave other concerts, on 12 July 1903 at the Cafe Moderno in Pontevedra, and in 1904 at the Circulo Mercantil in Santiago de Compostela. In June 1904, he was awarded a grant to study at the Madrid Royal Conservatory with José del Hierro, an exponent of the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing who was considered the leading Spanish violinist of his time. In 1906 he was given a 1682 Amati violin by an admiring family. He continued to give concerts in Madrid and throughout Galicia while he studied.

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