Composer and Conductor. He was the minor of eighteen brothers and his father was dead before he was born. His musical education came after having demonstrated good disposition towards music and thanks to the fact of having a brother-in-law violinist: Julián Gil, who gave him its first lessons, which continued later with the composer José Calvo and with J. Soriano Fuentes. The last one cheered the boy to move up to Madrid, which he did about 1850; there he studied in the Conservatory with Hilarión Eslava and Pedro Albéniz. He was a violinist of the Band of the Real Theater and then it directed the bands of several theaters of Madrid: Novedades, Lope of Vega, Del Circo and Español. In these years, he composed his first works, generally brief orchestral pieces and fantasies on topics of Italian operas, genre with which he familiarized himself entirely.

Nevertheless, when he decided to initiate its theatrical career, he chose the Zarzuela genre. There were the years in which the Zarzuela was acquiring an unexpected heyday after a century of absolute oblivion and Fernández Caballero joined the group of composers who, in Madrid, filled with new life the genre. His first zarzuela, Tres Madres para una Hija at the Lope de Vega Theatre of Madrid made its début in 1854; on the following year he released La Vergonzosa in the palace and from 1856 he began producing with big fecundity several works every year, between which it stood out in this first period, Llegar y Besar el Santo and La Reina Topacio in 1861, and some titles in collaboration with Cristóbal Pudrid and some other composers. Among the works signed with Pudrid it is necessary to emphasize El Caballo Blanco (1861) and Juegos de Azar (1862).

In 1864 he traveled to the Cuba where he resided seven years as the director of a company of operettas and was a musical pedagogue. He returned to Madrid in 1871 facing the difficult political situation of the island and re-tackled its career as theatrical composer. In this second stage it achieved an initial success with La Gallina Ciega (1873), but the zarzuela that truly gave him definitive reputation was La Marsellesa with text of Miguel Ramos Carrión, released in the Teatro de la Calle Jovellanos of Madrid in 1876. In this work, based on an imaginary episode placed in the hight of the French Revolution, Manuel Fernández Caballero presents already entirely formed his brilliant style, close to the operetta, at that time so in vogue in Europe, with elegant waltzes, its felt ones romazas and its upbeat scenes. The universal and perennial character of his music explains his survival in the zarzuela repertoire with several works.

Another title that has remained in the repertoire is Los Sobrinos del Capitán Grant, namesake to the famous Julio Verne’s novel, released in 1877 in the theater Del Circo of Madrid, also with text by Miguel Ramos Carrión.

It followed Los Negros Catedráticos and El Salto del Paisego in 1878, the last one with texts of Luis Eguiláz who had already died when the work was released in the Theater of the Zarzuela of Madrid. It is a complex work placed in the reign of Carlos IV and it has an action story full of cruelties being one of the best scores of the composer who, nevertheless, ended up disappearing of the repertoire because the incongruities of its argument.

They continued a few years in which the production of Fernández Caballero somehow suffers perhaps from its own political character and from the collaborations with other composers in putting music to texts without interest. Some titles can be quoted like El Corpus de Sangre (1879), La Niña Bonita (1881), El Gran Tamorlán de Persia (1882) in collaboration with composer Miguel Nieto, etc. In these years, also he traveled to Lisbon and to countries of South America to direct some of its works.

In 1887 and inside the called Género Chico, he stood out with Chateaux Margaux, released in the Theater of Varieties of Madrid. This piece with text of José Jackson Veyán, reached an extraordinary popularity.

The last stage of the activity of Fernández Caballero was perhaps the most out-standing, although at the time (that corresponds more or less to the last decade of the XIX century) was he suffering from cataracts and in his last years he had to dictate his work to its son Mario. Indeed, his work better strengthened in the habitual repertoire is dated back to this period: El Dúo de La Africana (1893), El Cabo Primero (1895), La Viejecita (1897) and Gigantes y Cabezudos (1898).

In 1902, he read his work “Los Cantos Populares Españoles” as speech of revenue in the Academy of Fine Arts of Madrid for which he had been chosen in 1891 but his almost entire blindness had prevented him from doing till then.

In 1904, an expressive homage was given up owing to the golden jubilee of the premiere of its first theatrical production. He died in Madrid on February 26, 1906.