Madrid Royal Conservatory is a higher music school, the oldest public institution of musical education in Spain, which provides higher education (equivalent to university) in music. Its history, lasting a century and a half, is representative of the vicissitudes of music in Spanish society. Many of the most important Spanish performers and composers of the last two centuries have come from its classrooms.
The Royal Conservatory of Music was founded on July 15, 1830, by royal decree, and was originally located in Mostenses Square, Madrid, Community of Madrid, Spain.
In 1852 it was moved to the Royal Opera, where it remained until the building was condemned by royal order and classes ordered to halt in 1925. For the next sixty-five years, the school had no fixed home, operating in a variety of locations. Since 1990, the Conservatory has officially lived in a restored 18th-century building in front of the Queen Sofia Museum.
The pavilion that houses the Conservatory, renovated by the architects Manuel and Ignacio de las Casas and Jaime Lorenzo, was previously the San Carlos Clinical Hospital. At the beginning of the century, the building had already been renovated by the architect Cesáreo Iradier to serve as a clinic, but it was originally designed to form part of the Gran Hospital de Atocha (Francesco Sabatini, 1722-1795), a complex and unfinished building around a system of courtyards built according to the canons of eighteenth-century classicism. Only what was once the hospital and is now an art centre and one of the pavilions, now the Conservatory, were built. The pavilion was attached to the General Hospital and was finally separated in 1929 to make way for Santa Isabel Street.
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