AHJ, Vol. 7 No. 4, Winter 1980

and a long and lucrative Brazilian tour about the time
of the marriage enabled Zabaleta to think of attempting
to establish himself at last in Europe.
Doors did not open easily or quickly and
everywhere it seemed that his Latin American success
was not good enough. In England he was told
that Latin Americans had an affinity for the harp (the
street harp), but that he could expect nothing similar
there. In Germany the struggle started the same way
but finally ended in success. "It was the same fight,
but it went fantastically." Zabaleta feels that there is
a meeting of the minds between Basque and German
people. "We are more reserved, more introverted, not
so given to emotional expression, we talk less."
(Zabaleta, by the way, speaks four languages fluently:
his native Basque and Castillian in addition to
French and English.) His most successful recordings
have been produced by the German firm DGG
(Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft). These albums,
the sales of which are rapidly climbing toward
one and one-half million copies, have won a number
of international prizes for artistic and recording excellence,
and are heard on radio stations around the
world. (A complete discography of Zabaleta recordings
is appended at the end of this article.)
Zabaleta has exerted perhaps a greater influence on
current harp repertory than any other single artist: he
was the first major recitalist to program primarily
works composed originally for the instrument rather
than the standard transcriptions and music by
harpist-composers so favored in earlier times. He has
conducted endless research to discover and recover
valid works of the past, including especially the
music of the masters of the Spanish Renaissance, and
he has been honored with dedications by a number of
contemporary composers. This latter category includes
sonatas by Glanville-Hicks, Tailleferre, Hovhaness,
and Krenek, and concertos by Milhaud, Rodrigo,
Villa-Lobos, Piston, and Tal, to name just a few
of the best known. In addition to the works written
expressly for him, Zabaleta has introduced works of
Virgil Thomson, Alberto Ginastera, and Carlos
Surinach, among many others. Schott has issued his
editions of works by Beethoven, Dussek, and Spanish
masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, and more
recently sonatas by M. Albeniz and J. Galles have
been edited by Zabaleta for Lyra Music.
More than three hundred of the world's largest
orchestras have engaged him as soloist: the list includes
the Israel Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic,
the Vienna Philharmonic, the Warsaw
Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic of London,
the Orchestre de Paris, the New York Philharmonic,
and the Philadelphia Orchestra with which he gave
the first performance of the Ginastera Concerto in-
1965. Since his debut in New York in 1934, Zabaleta
has given more than 2,500 recitals in the United
States, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and
Japan, and has appeared at festivals at Berlin,
Bucharest, Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, Lucerne, Osaka,
Winter/1980
Original drawing of Nicanor Zabaleta by Linda Shennan.
Rehearsing with Onnandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra for the
first perfonnance of the Ginastera Concerto.
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