The Cuban American composer, pianist, conductor, teacher and general mover and shaker, first Latin American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and this year 2026, still going strong at the age of 82.
All the more remarkable for her humble beginnings in Havana – humble, but supportive. Her grandmother insisted that she be admitted to the local music conservatory, at four, even before she could read. Her grandfather bought her a piano the following year: she had a wonderful teacher who sent her postcards from Paris; and she grew up on stories of the great Black artists – Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker – many of whom she would one day be working with herself.
By the time that she realised she had to leave Cuba. She got a masters in music and a CPA in case the music failed to come off – and jumped on one of the freedom flights to Miami, then on a one-way to New York and never looked back.
It was an interesting year. 1967, when protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War were in full swing. She worked as an accompanist for ballet and Broadway and quickly had a stroke of good luck. The first Black principal at the New York City Ballet (Arthur Mitchell) heard her playing and made a suggestion that changed the course of her life. “Why don’t you write a piece and I will do the choreography?” he said. And that was the beginning of her composing.
Study with Leonard Bernstein and commissions and residencies followed from all over the world: The Dance Theatre of Harlem, The Munich Biennale, The London Phil and so many more. She won her Pulitzer in 2021 for this, Stride, and many awards followed including the Kennedy Center Honors, the induction to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, first woman to win the Tomas Luis de Victoria prize in Spain.
“I have always been a proponent of accepting the new with open arms”, she says. “Talent is talent. We must give opportunities to those who knock on doors looking for it. The history of the world is full of stories of humans who were marginalized and ended up on stage receiving a Nobel Prize”
Tania León, born 1943
MUSIC: Stride
London Philharmonic / Dmitri Slobodeniouk
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
