Iriarte, Yriarte, Tomás de, *18 September 1750 Puerto de la Cruz de Orotava (Canary Islands), †17 September 1791 Madrid, Spanish poet, playwright, fable author, amateur musician, theorist. He was initially educated in Orotava, and from 1764 in Madrid under the tutelage of his uncle Juan de Iriarte, the royal librarian. From 1771, he worked as a civil servant, translator and archivist (from 1776). He was a prominent figure in Madrid’s literary circles. He translated numerous dramatic works by Voltaire, Molière, Goldoni, Metastasio, Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace’s Ars Poetica and others; he introduced the genre of the didactic verse fable to Spain (Fábulas literarias, Madrid 1782); he wrote several plays and a work on literary theory (Observaciones sobre las fábulas literarias). Iriarte was also an active amateur musician; he played the violin and the viola. He supplemented his musical education with A. Rodríguez de Hita. In his didactic poem La música, published in Madrid in 1779 (which was reprinted and translated many times), Iriarte – in five cantos – set out the principles for dealing with musical elements (scales, melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo), musical expression and articulation, and discussed church, theatrical and instrumental (functional) music. The composers he particularly admired were Gluck, Jommelli and Haydn. In his poem, he also mentions theorists and composers such as Zarlino, Kircher, Rameau, Salinas, Cerone, Morales, Guerrero and others. La música concludes with an essay on the suitability of the Spanish language for use in conjunction with music.
Iriarte also composed the melodrama Guzmán el Bueno (performed in 1790 in Cádiz and 1791 in Madrid), in which he introduced, for the first time in Spain – following Rousseau’s Pygmalion – a monologue accompanied by an orchestra; he himself composed 10 orchestral movements for this work (manuscript in the Biblioteca Municipal in Madrid). None of Iriarte’s other compositions, with the exception of Canon de sociedad (published in Madrid, no date), have survived.
Literature: E. Cotarelo y Mori Iriarte y su época, Madrid 1897; J. Subirá El compositor Iriarte, 2 vols., Barcelona 1949, 1950; R.M. Cox T. de Iriarte, New York 1972; F.J. León Tello La teoria española de la música en los siglos XVII y XVIII, Madrid 1974.
