Garcia, Manuel-Vincent

Garcia, Manuel-Vincent (22 January 1775, Seville; 2 June 1832, Paris) entered the choir of the Seville cathedral at age six. Since there was no theatre in his native city, the boy heard only church music until the director of the theatre at Cadiz invited him to come to his city to perform in a tonadilla. He went on to Madrid from Cadiz and thence south again to Malaga, where he wrote his first opera, Preso, imitated from a French comic opera, but he hurried back to the Spanish capital because…