Andalusia, from Copenhagen

Track nineteen ended in Mozart’s town. Track twenty, the last on the standard edition, begins in Copenhagen.

The facts. Track twenty runs four minutes and fifty seconds. It is the Romanza andaluza, the first of two Spanish Dances that Pablo de Sarasate published as his Op. 22. This time the credit changes: Arr. Garrett / van der Heijden for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.

And this time you can hear the guitars.

Pamplona, 1844. Sarasate plays the violin as a small child, wins the favour of Queen Isabella II in Madrid, and then the top prize at the Paris Conservatoire.

By the 1870s composers are writing for him. Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole. Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Saint-Saëns’s Third Concerto and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso. And Wieniawski’s Second Concerto, from the man in track eighteen.

Whistler painted him in 1884. In The Red-Headed League, Sherlock Holmes takes Watson to hear him play.

In 1877 the Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock asks him for a set of Spanish dances.

He finishes the second pair the following year, on his first concert tour of Scandinavia. The Jota navarra is dated Stockholm, 22 October 1878. The other piece has no title on the manuscript, only a place and a date.

Copenhague, 4 Novembre 1878.

It became the Romanza andaluza: an Andalusian romance, written in Denmark, for a publisher in Berlin, by a man from Navarre. He dedicated the pair to Wilma Norman-Neruda, a violinist from Moravia.

Simrock printed them in 1879. Sarasate swapped the order, so the Romanza comes first.

The two were written as a pair, one lyrical and one brilliant.

The quiet one won. The Henle edition says the Romanza soon outstripped its sister in popularity. It became one of the pieces Sarasate played most often himself.

Garrett has played the sister. The Jota navarra is on his Rock Symphonies open-air live DVD, and Zigeunerweisen is on Classic Romance. On his repertoire list, the Romanza andaluza has one recording against it: Immortal.

So the album ends on the quiet one.

Every year Sarasate went back to Pamplona for San Fermín. He died in Biarritz in 1908, across the border in France.

The manuscript of the Romanza is in Pamplona now, in the city archive.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Track twenty’s answer is a place. Sarasate wrote it a long way from Spain, and you can still tell where it comes from.

That’s the standard edition: twenty tracks. The deluxe edition has five more, and we’ll walk through those too, as bonus tracks. Next, Schumann.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as printed by Deutsche Grammophon and david-garrett.com; the composition, the autograph’s dates and order, the dedication and the piece’s popularity from the preface to the Henle edition (HN 1346); Simrock’s commission and publication from Henle (HN 1370) and the reference literature on the Spanish Dances; Sarasate’s life, the works written for him, Whistler, Holmes, San Fermín and his death from the reference literature on Sarasate; Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com.