María Luisa Ozaita

Spanish pianist, harpsichordist, musicologist, conductor, composer and music professor María Luisa Ozaita was born in Baracaldo on 20 May 1939. She studied with Navarrese composer Fernando Remacha and then in Copenhagen with Leif Thybo and K J Isaksen, in France with Kenneth Gilbert and also at Darmstadt.

She performed internationally in Europe and North America, and her music - mainly chamber and symphonic works - has been performed internationally. The opera Pelleas y Melisanda, with text by Pablo Neruda, is one of her most important works. She was also known for her guitar music, such as the 1994 suite Micropiezas para guitarra. Some of her music has been recorded by RNE (Radio Classic), including the 2010 Tema con variaciones for piano.

She lectured on music history, contributed to magazines such as Confutatis and OpusMusica and to Patricia Adkins Chiti's Women in Music (including writing the appendix on nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish composers for the Spanish edition of this book, Mujeres en la Música). She was also the founding president in 1989 of the Spanish Association of Women in Music, and at the time of her death in Madrid on 5 April 2017, aged seventy-seven, she was the honorary president of this association.