Spanish composer Manuel de Falla was BOTD in 1876. Born Manuel María de los Dolores Falla y Matheu in Cádiz to a prosperous middle-class family, he showed an early talent for music. In 1900, his family moved to Madrid, where he studied at the Real Conservatorio de Música y Declamación, winning prizes for piano playing and writing and performing his own piano pieces. After scoring a triumph with his one-act opera La vida breve (The Brief Life), he moved to Paris in 1907, joining an elite artistic circle including Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Maurice Ravel. Returning to Madrid at the start of World War One, he wrote the ballet El amor brujo (Love the Magician), a thundering piece inspired by Andalusian folk music containing the popular Ritual Fire Dance. His 1916 orchestral suite Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain), again influenced by Andalusian folk music, established his reputation as Spain’s leading contemporary composer. Encouraged by Diaghilev, he scored El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) for the Ballets Russes, first performed in London in 1919 with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso. De Falla moved to Granada in 1919, where his home became a salon for queer intellectuals and artists, including his close friend Federico García Lorca. Appointed President of the Institute of Spain by Francisco Franco in 1935, he resigned after the assassination of Lorca, and emigrated to Argentina. The Franco government offered him a generous pension to return to Spain, which he refused, dying in Córdoba in 1946, aged 69. A lifelong bachelor, little is known of his personal life or relationships, though biographers have speculated that he was involved in a ménage à trois with Ravel and Spanish pianist Ricardo Vines.