He was one of the most important Cuban musicians of the 19th century. From the stage of his childhood he demonstrated great aptitudes to develop in the field of music. He received his first lessons related to music through his father.  Already when he was seven years old he was able to demonstrate his aptitudes before a great musician who visited his house and was surprised by his precocity.  The praise of this musician motivated Cervantes' parents to encourage their son to continue his piano studies. At a very young age he composed his first contradanza, which he dedicated to his mother. He was also the author of zarzuelas, waltzes, symphonies, a comic opera and many other pieces of great value, among which his Cuban dances stand out. He died in Havana on April 29, 1905.

Cuban Dances

These are works by Ignacio Cervantes. According to the specialists, his dances can be classified in three periods: the initial ones that include the first 5, others, framed between 6 and 18 that correspond to those that are closer to the contradanza and from 19 onwards that represent the fullness of these brief works that he handled with unsurpassable mastery and elegance.  Not all the dances have the date of composition. After the first one, written in 1857, the remaining ones followed, qualified by Cervantes himself, in some cases, as minor works. Nevertheless, the interpretation of this repertoire requires a high pianistic level, since many of them are real challenges to achieve the result intended by the author-some of them difficult to solve-preferably with regard to the recurrent polyphonic treatment in several pieces that move them away from any simplicity and underline their pianistic attractiveness. It is said that Ignacio Cervantes succeeded in emancipating dance from dance music and turned it into an independent genre by placing it in the field of pure music.  To conceive a dance Cervantes sometimes needed no more than a randomly heard phrase or a scene to compose it.