Arriaga's music is "elegant, accomplished and notable for its harmonic warmth" (
New Grove Concise Dictionary of Music). His greatest works are undoubtedly the three string quartets, which (like his predecessors', D. Scarlatti, Soler and Boccherini) contain notably Spanish ethnic rhythmic and melodic elements, especially in the galloping 6/8 finale of No. 1 in D minor and the meditative second (slow) movements of No. 2 in A major (an impressive set of variations in D major taking off from the slow D major variation movements in Mozart's K. 464 and Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 5 (both also in A major as a whole), which climaxes in a D minor variation even more passionate than Mozart's D minor variation in K. 464, in the form of an impassioned, plangent lament on the top two strings of the viola going up to the second A above middle C) and No. 3 in
E-flat major (a tender G major lullaby for the newborn Christ child). Periodwise, his style is on the borderline between late Classicism and early Romanticism, ranging from the late Classical idiom of Mozart to the proto-Romanticism of early Beethoven. According to
Grove, Arriaga's death "before he was 20 was a sad loss to Basque music". Following his early death, with the only reliable biographical material at the time being some reports by Fétis, his life story was fictionalized to play into rising
Basque nationalism. Data on the composer remains scarce, but in 1989 the Basque Studies program at the
University of Nevada, Reno published the only English language biography of Arriaga, with appendix and bibliography of works, written by
Barbara Rosen (
Arriaga, the Forgotten Genius: the Short Life of a Basque Composer); and in honor of the 200th anniversary of Arriaga's birth,
Scherzo, the Spanish musical magazine, published a series of articles on the composer, with updated bibliographies, in its January 2006 issue. The view that emerges from both these newer sources does not contradict what Fétis said, but emphasizes that Arriaga's early death was a loss not just to Basque culture but also to Spanish music and by extension, European classical music as a whole. According to
Rosen "It is [...] possible to hear passages in Arriaga's work similar to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, although he sometimes fails to achieve the complexity of these composers' more mature works. Nevertheless, Arriaga has an identifiable and original style which, in time, undoubtedly would have become more individual and more recognizably his own, possibly incorporating more Spanish and Basque than Viennese elements." A
public theatre in his home city of
Bilbao carries his name. ==Selected recordings==