Enrique Granados


Pantaleón Enrique Joaquín Granados Campiña, commonly known as Enrique Granados, was a Spanish pianist and composer of classical music.

Life

Pantaleón Enrique Joaquín Granados Campiña was born in Lleida, Spain, the son of Calixto José de la Trinidad Granados y Armenteros, a Spanish army captain who was born in Havana, Cuba, and Enriqueta Elvira Campiña de Herrera, from Santander, Spain. As a young man he studied piano in Barcelona, where his teachers included Francisco Jurnet and Joan Baptista Pujol. In 1887 he went to Paris to study. He was unable to become a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but he was able to take private lessons with a conservatoire professor, Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot, whose mother, the soprano Maria Malibran, was of Spanish ancestry. Bériot insisted on extreme refinement in tone production, which strongly influenced Granados's teaching of pedal technique. He also fostered Granados's abilities in improvisation. Just as important were his studies with Felip Pedrell. He returned to Barcelona in 1889. His first successes were at the end of the 1890s, with the opera María del Carmen, which attracted the attention of King Alfonso XIII.
In 1911 Granados premiered his suite for piano Goyescas, which became his most famous work. It is a set of six pieces based on paintings of Francisco Goya. Such was the success of this work that he was encouraged to expand it. He wrote an opera based on the subject in 1914, but the outbreak of World War I forced the European premiere to be canceled. It was performed for the first time in New York City on 28 January 1916 and was very well received. Shortly afterwards, he was invited to perform a piano recital for President Woodrow Wilson. Before leaving New York, Granados also made live-recorded player piano music rolls for the New-York-based Aeolian Company's "Duo-Art" system, all of which survive today and can be heard – his very last recordings.

Death

The delay incurred by accepting the recital invitation caused him to miss his boat back to Spain. Instead, he took a ship to England, where he boarded the passenger ferry SS Sussex for Dieppe, France. On the way across the English Channel, the Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat, as part of the German World War I policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. According to witness Daniel Sargent, Granados's wife, Amparo, was too heavy and couldn't get into a lifeboat. Granados refused to leave her and positioned her on a small life raft on which she knelt and he clung. Both then drowned within sight of other passengers. However, the ship broke in two parts, and only one sank. Ironically, the part of the vessel that contained his cabin did not sink and was towed to port, with most of the passengers, except for Granados and his wife, on board. Granados and his wife left six children: Eduard, Solita, Enrique, Víctor, Natalia, and Francisco.
The personal papers of Enrique Granados are preserved in, among other institutions, the National Library of Catalonia.

Music and influence

Granados wrote piano music, chamber music, songs, zarzuelas, and an orchestral tone poem based on Dante's Divine Comedy. Many of his piano compositions have been transcribed for the classical guitar: examples include Dedicatoria, Danza No. 5, Goyescas.
His music can be divided into basically three styles or periods:
  1. A romantic style including such pieces as Escenas Románticas and Escenas Poeticas.
  2. A more typically nationalist, Spanish style including such pieces as Danzas Españolas, 6 Piezas sobre cantos populares españoles.
  3. The Goya period, which includes the piano suite Goyescas, the opera Goyescas, various Tonadillas for voice and piano, and other works.
Granados was a significant influence on at least two other famous Spanish composers and musicians, Manuel de Falla and Pablo Casals. He was also the teacher of composer Rosa García Ascot.

Some important works

Recordings by Granados

*