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."