Believing that a nation's music should be inspired by its native traditions, the Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) drew on Spanish folk music and dances to compose his piano pieces and operas. Among his best-known works is Goyescas, a piano suite inspired by the paintings of the Spanish artist Goya (1746-1828) and his period of revolutionary political upheaval.
Background
He was born Pantaleon Enrique Granados y Campina on July 27, 1867, at Lerida, Catalonia. His father, though Cuban by birth, was an officer in the Spanish army, and so the precocious child's earliest musical studies, both in piano playing and in theory, started under an army bandmaster. Soon, however, the family settled in Barcelona, where Enrique received piano instruction under Francisco X. Jurnet and Joan Baptista Pujol, and later worked at composition with Felipe Pedrell. From 1887 to 1889 Granados was in Paris, studying under Charles de Beriot, lodging with his compatriot pianist Ricardo Vines, and reveling in an existence devoted equally to music and to bohemianism. He returned to Barcelona in 1890, a full-fledged pianist and composer, and married two years later.
Career
In his concert appearances Granados played many of his own works, including the Spanish dances and the piano version of his Goyescas (a piano suite named after scenes from the paintings and tapestries of Goya and episodes from the Goyesque period in Madrid, a time marked by bloodshed and political upheaval). He began these pieces about 1902, and the work occupied him on and off for seven years.
Granados produced, in addition to original compositions, sundry arrangements, adaptations, editings, studies, and even a textbook. Meanwhile, appearing at intervals throughout his career were several stage works, among which were the operas Follet (1903) and Liliana (1911). After the premièrepremiere of his opera Maria del Carmen in 1898 he was made a Knight of the Order of Carlos III. Later distinctions he received were Officier de l'Instruction Publique and Chevalier de la LégionLegion d' Honneur.
When the Goyescas piano suite had received its first performance, in 1911, Granados turned to a project that may well have already been long in his mind--an opera based on the same material. But for the outbreak of the war, the opera would have been produced in Paris in 1914. Instead, the premièrepremiere was in New York on Jan. 26, 1916. Two months later, on March 24, Granados was returning home from this event when his ship, the Sussex, was torpedoed in the English Channel; both he and his wife were drowned.
Like Isaac AlbénizAlbeniz (1860-1909), Granados was a member of the national school of composers in Spain who felt that a nation should build its art music on the foundation of its native folk-songs and folk-dances. (The leader of this movement was Granados' former teacher, Pedrell.) Granados was among the great pianists of his era; his Goyescas pieces established him as a serious composer, and his Spanish dances were to secure his position in light composition.