Last week, we lost one of our hemisphere’s most important composers, Mario Lavista. Born in Mexico City in 1943, he studied with Carlos Chávez, Héctor Quintanar and Rodolfo Halffter. Later, he received a scholarship to study in Europe. In addition to having composed a vast catalog of works for nearly every genre, as an educator he helped form several generations of Mexico’s most promising young composers.
I never met Mario Lavista, personally, but in 1995 I submitted an article of mine about Mexican chamber music for wind instruments to Pauta, which is a music journal that he founded in 1982. After it was published early that next year, I received a copy of the issue that included my article. Attached inside was a very nice letter from Mario Lavista in which he expressed his appreciation for my article and that Pauta’s doors would always be open for me.
Those few words meant and still mean a lot to me.
So in memoriam, there may be no better tribute than to listen to one of his most poignant works, Responsorio en Memoriam Rodolfo Halffter, which Lavista composed following the former’s death in 1987.
Maestro Lavista, descanse en paz.
John L. Walker