Pere Astort i Ribas - Chrysanthèmes chéris (Salon Valse lente)

Early 20th century spanish salon valse. If you're not into that, then better skip this video :) But even in this case, there is a nice story to tell about this composer as I found a beautiful article about this composer. the reference in the end, i take out interesting bits of the article:

Not much is known about the pianist and composer Pere Astort i Ribas, better known – or maybe less unknown – by the alias Clifton Worsley. Despite being one of the most famous musicians in the city of Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century, it is next to impossible to find any mention of him in any history of Catalan music. Great efforts will uncover just a few encyclopaedic references to him, in spite of his importance: a distinguished Barcelonian who found success in the United States with compositions he wrote himself, inspired by the popular music from the other side of the Atlantic.

Before adopting the alias Clifton Worsley, Astort (1873-1925 (apparently IMSLP is wrong! There it says 1935)) had started to become known as a shop assistant at Can Guàrdia, the popular sheet music shop and publisher, which later took the name Casa Beethoven. The young Astort met Mercè Gresa (sister-in-law of Rafael Guàrdia i Granell, founder of the sheet music business) at the shop on La Rambla de Sant Josep. The young pianist married Gresa in 1895, and, over time, became one of the most well-regarded employees in the eyes of the select clientele that went to the shop. Lluís Permanyer, a Barcelona historian, recreated the ambience of Casa Beethoven at the end of the 19th century in a 1987 article for La Vanguardia. He talked about the visits to Can Guàrdia made by Isaac Albéniz, Felip Pedrell, the maestro Millet and, especially, Jacint Verdaguer: “make them fly”, Permanyer says the poet declared when he read his verses to some of the greats of Catalan music. At one end of the shop there was (and still is) an upright piano, where the shop assistant Astort sat down to play for a bit.

Legend has it that one day Charles Danton, an American musician, stopped by Can Guàrdia while Astort was playing the piano. Danton was gobsmacked by the style of one of the compositions the pianist was playing. When he found out that the waltz had been written by the man himself, he told him that the work sounded like one of the typical waltzes that were in fashion in Boston, where he was from. He then recommended that Astort change his name to something more American-sounding, suggesting that he call himself Clifton Worsley. In 1899, Astort, or Worsley as he was now known, published his first “Boston waltz” with his brother-in-law’s publishing house, which he named after the American city as a tribute to the man who discovered him. Ramon Civit explains that in that same year, the Banda de Barcelona played the waltz in Parc de la Ciutadella during a typical summertime evening event.

Worsley was presented as “the creator of the Boston waltz”. And what exactly was the “Boston waltz”? Civit talks about a similar genre in the court of Louis XV of France, which made it over to the United States in 1835 thanks to the dancer Lorenzo Papatino. But Astort/Clifton Worsley went even further, according to Ramon Civit: “Despite the fact that this type of waltz – slightly slower than the Viennese waltz – already existed, the young Barcelona composer unquestionably contributed to modernising it, both in terms of its form as well as its harmony”, he points out.

Worsley ended up writing around 200 compositions. This piece was composer 1914, when WWI started.
After his death in 1925 Astort was gradually forgotten. Almost 50 years after his death, the journalist Pablo Vila San-Juan dedicated an article to him in La Vanguardia Española. Talking about the premiere in Barcelona of a comedy attributed to a foreign writer, Vila San-Juan used the example of Pere Astort as one of a writer that had to change his name to attain the fame he deserved. Vila San-Juan described a visit to Astort at his home where, according to the journalist, the Catalan composer had confessed to him that thanks to taking the alias Clifton Worsley he was able to enjoy the recognition that he would not have received as Pere Astort. This theory is at least debatable if we look at the comments from the press at the time.

From 1925 onwards, there have only been a few occasions when the name Clifton Worsley has come up.

http://lameva.barcelona.cat/bcnmetrop...