Antonio Francisco Javier José Soler Ramos was baptised on 3 December 1729 at Olot in the County of Besalú, Catalonia. At six he entered the Escolania of the monastery of Montserrat, studying with the resident mestre Benet Esteve and the organist Benet Valls, and at seventeen, in 1746, was appointed director of music at Lleida. In 1752, aged twenty-three, he moved to Castile and was admitted to the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial on the strength of his composing and organ playing; he entered as a novice that year and took holy orders the year after, joining the Hieronymite community. There he studied with José de Nebra and — by some accounts — with Domenico Scarlatti, before teaching in his own right, and was appointed music master to the Infantes Antonio and Gabriel, sons of Carlos III. He kept twenty-hour working days and died at the monastery on 20 December 1783.

He left more than five hundred compositions, among them around a hundred and fifty keyboard sonatas, many written for his pupil the Infante Don Gabriel, and catalogued in the early twentieth century by Samuel Rubio, whose R numbers are still used. They invite comparison with Scarlatti’s but are more varied in shape, some running to three or four movements where Scarlatti kept to one or two. He also wrote concertos, quintets for organ and strings, motets, masses, Christmas villancicos and solo organ music, along with the treatise Llave de la modulación of 1762; the Six Concertos for Two Organs are regularly recorded. The fandango attributed to him is performed more than anything else he wrote, and Rubio — who had earlier confirmed the attribution — later withdrew it, declaring the search for the real author open.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Soler_(composer)
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q314799