Nicolás Ruiz Espadero (February 15, 1832 – August 30, 1890) was a Cuban pianist, composer, piano teacher and editor of the posthumous works of American composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
Without schooling and formal musical training, he grew into a chronically shy person, emotionally dependent on his mother.
Cuba was then still a Spanish colony and in all matters of administration, economy and interior and exterior policy dependent on Madrid.
Cuba's society was sharply divided into a privileged class of landowners and Spanish colonial administrators – and black and mulatto slaves.
[3] His mother was a pianist from Cadiz, Spain who distinguished herself in the Havana salons around 1810 performing Haydn and Mozart.
As is often the case in well-to-do families, the father wanted his only son to become a lawyer, an officer or an administrator – but not a musician.
Although proud of his wife's musical talents and flattered by his son's nascent artistic abilities, Espadero's father would only permit half an hour's piano lesson every day.
What education he had received came from pieces and fragments from European, especially Spanish, culture, from selected and very mixed readings and from the surroundings of Cuban upper-class society.
Fontana stayed a year and a half (until November 1845) in Havana giving concerts, composing and teaching.
As soon as Espadero started to eschew the bravura pieces of the day, publishers were no longer interested in his music.
Carpentier writes: He distanced himself from his colleagues, gruffly reproaching them for not having created a serious institution for the teaching of music.