Alberto Evaristo Ginastera was born in Argentina in 1916 and grew up in Buenos Aires in a family of Italian and Catalan immigrants with no particular interest in music. He began taking piano lessons at the age of seven, and then attended the Conservatorio Alberto Williams, where he received a gold medal in composition in 1935. The first sketches of his Opus 1 date from the previous year, when he began work on the ballet Panambí, based on an indigenous legend, which premiered in 1937 at the Teatro Colón, conducted by Juan José Castro, a conductor and composer who would become Ginastera’s first mentor. In the meantime, Ginastera had enrolled in the National Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Athos Palma, José Gil, and José André, graduating with honors in 1938. His final composition for his studies was a work of sacred music, titled Salmo CL. At this time, he also wrote his first scores inspired by Argentinian folklore, notably Malambo op. 7 for piano, whose percussive 6/8 rhythm and polytonal harmonies would come to characterize his musical language.

His career reached a turning point in 1941 when Aaron Copland heard his work and fell in love with the promise of Argentinian music. At almost exactly the same time, Lincoln Kirstein, the director of George Balanchine’s American Ballet Caravan, commissioned Ginastera to write what would become his best-known composition, the ballet Estancia op. 8, inspired by rural life in the pampa. In 1941, Ginastera also married Mercedes de Toro, with whom he often collaborated, and with whom he had two children: Alex, born in 1942, and Georgina, born in 1944. In 1942, Ginastera received a Guggenheim fellowship to study in the United States, which was delayed until the end of the Second World War. During this time he composed several of the pieces that best exemplify his nationalist aesthetic, in which the folk and classical traditions are placed in dialogue with each other, while also featuring a marked evolution toward a more pan-American worldview.

By the time he returned from New York, Ginastera was recognized as one of Argentina’s foremost composers; his work was regularly performed abroad, principally in the United States, but also in Europe. In the years that followed, he wrote his first Piano Sonata (1952), as well as a number of music scores. During this time he was an active participant in his country’s institutional development. In 1947, he and Castro founded the Liga de Compositores, a local chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music. In 1948, under Perón, he founded the Conservatory of Music and Scenic Arts at La Plata, in the province of Buenos Aires; he would be stripped of his functions in 1952, and then return to them in 1956, after Perón fell. In 1958, he founded the music program of the Universidad Católica Argentina, and in 1962 founded the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Instituto Di Tella, which during the 1960s became a key institution for young composers throughout Latin America.

In the early 1960s, Ginastera composed his folk-inspired masterpiece, Cantata para América Mágica op. 27, for soprano and percussion orchestra (1960), as well as the powerful Concerto for piano and orchestra op. 28 (1962), which, when the progressive rock group Emerson, Lake, & Palmer covered its fourth movement in 1973, would become his most widely recognized work. Ginastera then turned to composing operas, first Don Rodrigo, based on a libretto by Alejandro Casona, which premiered in Buenos Aires in 1964, and then Bomarzo, which premiered in 1967 in Washington, DC, with a libretto by the novelist Manuel Mujica Lainez inspired by the Bomarzo Gardens near Rome. A third opera, Beatrix Cenci, based on the writing of Stendhal and Artaud, which premiered in Washington, DC in 1971, is perhaps the most polished of his lyric works, although Bomarzo remains the best known, because of the outrage provoked when the dictator Juan Carlos Onganía banned it in 1967.

By the end of the 1960s, the CLAEM had closed and he had separated from Mercedes de Toro; soon after, he met the cellist Aurora Nátola - all factors influencing his move to Geneva at that time. Ginastera married Nátola in 1971, and composed several cello pieces for her including his second Concerto op. 50 (1981), the last in his rich catalog of concert pieces. His new life in Switzerland inspired such intimate pieces as Cantata Milena op. 37 (1971) for soprano and orchestra, based on Kafka’s letters, as well as a return to sacred music with Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam op. 42 (1974). In 1980, he attended the premiere of Iubilum for orchestra (op. 51) at the Teatro Colón, a commission by the city of Buenos Aires as part of the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of its founding. When Ginastero died in 1983, he left behind several drafts and works-in-progress, including one that reached back to his early work in the folk tradition, Popol Vuh op. 44 for orchestra.