Enrique Granados

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(b Lerida, 27 July 1867; d English Channel, 24 March 1916). Spanish composer. He studied in Barcelona with Pedrell and in Paris (1887-9), then returned to Barcelona to work as a teacher, pianist and composer. His greatest success came with the piano suite Goyescas (1911), a sequence of highly virtuoso studies after paintings by Goya; he expanded them to form an opera of the same title, produced in New York in 1916. His other works include songs, orchestral pieces and more piano music.

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The Spanish composer and pianist Enrique Granados (1867-1916) contributed significantly to the creation of a national Spanish music. His best-known work is the piano suite Goyescas.

Enrique Granados (y Campiña) was born in Lérida, Spain, on July 27, 1867. After his family moved to Barcelona he took piano lessons from Francisco Jurnet and Joan Baptista Pujol. In 1883 he began to study composition with Felipe Pedrell, composer, musicologist, and passionate champion of Spanish folk music, who introduced Granados to the principles of musical nationalism. In 1887 he went to Paris, where he studied piano privately with Charles de Bériot, one of the leading professors at the Conservatoire. He returned to Barcelona in 1889 and gave his first recital there the following year. This successful debut launched the concert career that eventually earned him an international reputation.

Despite the demands of performance, he also composed and taught piano. Among his most distinguished early works for piano are the Danzas españolas, 12 pieces gathered into four sets written in the 1890s. In these pieces - much admired by Massenet, Cui, Saint-Saëns, and Grieg - Granados incorporated elements of Spanish folk dances in a most distinctive and personal way. Of these deservedly popular dances, the fifth in E minor is the best known. Granados' first major success as a composer came in 1898 with the production of his opera Maria del Carmenin Madrid, for which he was honored by the king. He wrote four other operas which were produced in Barcelona, but they met with little success. In 1901 he established his own piano school, the Academia Granados.

Granados' most celebrated work, the piano suite Goyescas, received its first performance in Barcelona on March 9, 1911. It was a great success. When Granados played it in Paris on April 4, 1914, it was given an equally enthusiastic reception. Soon after, he was elected a member of the Legion of Honor and was asked by the Paris Opéra to turn Goyescas into an opera. The operatic version, with a libretto by Fernando Periquet, was accepted by the Opéra, but the outbreak of World War I put an end to plans for its production. The Metropolitan Opera took it over, and it had its world premiere in January 1916 in New York. Granados came to the United States to supervise the production and to attend the premiere.

Despite the favorable response of the audience and critics, the opera did not sustain interest and never found a place in the operatic repertory. Granados' trip to the United States ended in tragedy. Invited by President Wilson to play at the White House, Granados delayed his return home. Instead of taking a boat directly to Spain as he had planned, he went first to England and there boarded the Sussex for Dieppe. On March 24, 1916, the Sussex was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel. A survivor reported that Granados was safe in a lifeboat when he saw his wife struggling in the water. He jumped in to help her, and they both drowned. Shortly before he died Granados had written to a friend, "I have a whole world of ideas. I am only now starting my work." These ideas were never to be realized. Despite his early death, Granados left a sizable body of works. But he is remembered today chiefly for Goyescas, Danzas españolas, and his Tonadillas, songs for voice and piano.

Goyescas, subtitled "Los majos enamorados" ("The majos, or gallants, in love") consists of six pieces in two books. The title Goyescas means "in the manner of Goya" or "after Goya." Each of the six pieces is a musical evocation of a painting or etching by Francisco Goya, the famous 18th-century Spanish painter. Granados was totally captivated by the painter and his works, especially by his paintings of the "majas," those beautiful, mysterious aristocratic Spanish women with their mantillas and fans. In these pieces Granados brilliantly blended the stylistic and technical elements inherited from Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt with Spanish melodies, rhythms, and colors to achieve a highly individual, poetic musical expression.

Frank Marshall, a pupil of Granados and the teacher of Alicia de Larrocha, wrote: "Granados manages to capture all the elegance, subtlety and aristocracy of eighteenth-century Spain. He stylized, formalized and polished the folklore of his music." Technically the pieces are fraught with difficulties - rich, quasi-orchestral textures, wide stretches, numerous countermelodies, and much ornamentation. Of the six pieces the most famous is the fourth, Quejas, ó la maja y el ruiseñor (The Complaint, or The Maja and the Nightingale). It is followed by the first piece of Book II, El amor y la muerte (Love and Death), the most brilliant and dramatic of the set, in which Granados recalls themes previously heard in Book I. El pelele (The Strawman), although not published as part of the Goyescas, is usually appended to it. In performance it is played as the seventh and last piece. It is based on the music of the opening scene of the opera Goyescas, in which a "strawman" is being tossed in the air by the "majas."

Ernest Newman, the English critic who in 1917 called Goyescas"the finest piano music of our day," summarized the work's special quality and appeal: "The music, for all the fervor of its passion, is of classical beauty and composure. The harmony is rich but never experimental. The melodies have new curves, the rhythms new articulations. Informing it all is a new grace, a new pathos, a new melancholy … but, above all, the music is a gorgeous treat for the fingers, as all music that is the perfection of writing for its particular instrument is. It is difficult, but so beautifully laid out that it is always playable: one has the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly colored jewels…. It is pianoforte music of the purest kind."

Further Reading

The following books have sections on Granados: Gilbert Chase, The Music of Spain (1941, 1959); Ann Livermore, A Short History of Spanish Music (1972); Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (1970); and David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-Century Music (1968).

Granados, Enrique (ānrē'kā gränä'THōs), 1867-1916, Spanish composer and pianist, b. Havana; studied at Barcelona with Felipe Pedrell. His most significant works are those for the piano in which he created the peculiarly Spanish manner later used by de Falla. Goyescas (1911), a set of piano pieces that later formed the basis for an opera of the same name, is his outstanding work. He appeared as a pianist in Paris and Spain, and Casals and Saint-Saëns were among artists who performed with him and admired his style.

• Genres: Chamber Music, Keyboard Music, Opera, Vocal Music

Biography

One of the most colorful turn-of-the-century Spanish musicians, composer and pianist Enrique Granados is best remembered for his evocative solo piano works; his output also includes a great deal of orchestral music and six operas (only the last of which has gained any fame). Born in 1867 to an officer in the Spanish army, Granados received his first musical instruction from an army bandmaster. Further studies in Barcelona with Jurnet (piano) and Pedrell (composition) prepared the young musician for a brief but highly influential stay in Paris (1887-1889), during which Granados worked under well-known Parisian pianist and teacher Charles de Bériot (son of the famous violinist of the same name). Granados' earliest mature work, the Valses poéticos of 1887, was completed around this time.

After returning to Barcelona in 1890 Granados spent the next decade building a dual career as pianist and composer, forming a successful piano trio with Belgian violinist Crickboom and the young Pablo Casals. His first opera, Maria del Carmen, was well received at its premiere in 1898, after which the Order of Carlos III (a Spanish knighthood) was bestowed upon Granados by a supportive government. Granados was quick to follow up on this success, and two more operas were produced in the next five years.

For the 1900 season Granados founded the Society of Classical Concerts (Sociedad de Conciertos Clásicos) in Barcelona, which, although short-lived, gave him the confidence to create his own piano school the following year (known as the Granados School, or Academia Granados). The school was a success, and Granados maintained his involvement with it until his death.

Granados was one of the great pianists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Virtually all his music relies heavily on the Catalan and Spanish folk idiom (e.g. Twelve Spanish Pieces, or Six Pieces on Spanish Popular Songs), which, along with fellow Spaniard Isaac Albéniz, Granados was instrumental in bringing to the attention of the contemporary European musical establishment. Goyescas, begun in 1902 but not finished until 1911, is perhaps his mightiest achievement. (Granados also produced an opera by the same name -- both the pianistic and operatic incarnations of the work take the striking visuals of Goya as their inspiration.)

In 1916, while returning from the U.S.A. (where the opera Goyescas had received a New York premiere on January 26, 1916, and where Granados had performed in the White House for President Wilson), the liner Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Among the casualties were Granados and his wife of 24 years. ~ Blair Johnston, Rovi

Discography

The Composer as Pianist Buy this CD

Granados Plays Granados Buy this CD

Masters of the Piano Roll Buy this CD

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