Enrique Granados

Enrique (Enric in Catalan) Granados Campiña (b. 1867–d. 1916), recognized as one of the leading Spanish composers of the Belle Époque, best known for his piano suite Los majos enamorados (The majos in love) or Goyescas (1909–1910). The pianist Juan Bautista Pujol (b. 1835–d. 1898) was Granados’s teacher in Barcelona. He also had Felipe Pedrell (b. 1841–d. 1922) as a harmony and composition private tutor. Granados’s studies took him in 1887 to Paris, where he became a private pupil of Charles-Wilfrid de Bériot (b. 1833–d. 1914), who had a significant influence on his piano style. Granados returned to Barcelona in 1889, where he built his family home and achieved professional stability as a pianist, composer, and teacher. His first artistic successes were due to his activity as a composer-pianist. In the late 1890s, he also achieved relative success on the theatrical stage with María del Carmen, a rural drama that premiered at the Teatro Parish in Madrid in 1898. Cultural Spanish nationalism remained a constant reference point throughout his career. Nevertheless, his music should not come down to this aspect. A curious personality and a keen reader, he was open to many influences. He embraced Wagnerism, the principle of correspondence between the arts and a romantic conception of poetic music that underwent a renewal at the end of the 19th century, hence his fruitful relationship with Catalan modernism. His tragic and unexpected death, when a German torpedo sank the ship on which he was traveling back from New York, prematurely broke the international launch of his career. On the one hand, research into the life and music of Granados has been shaped for decades by the weight of personal impressions recollected in early assessments and by his lack of concern for his posterity, understandable given his premature death. On the other hand, his compositions have sometimes been appraised in conformity with formalist, aesthetic, or ideological assumptions that were alien to his artistic world. Publications on Granados prior to the scholarly research by Douglas Riva and Carol A. Hess should be used with caution. The main characteristics of the more recent publications on his life and musical work are the discovery and systematic use of newly available documentary sources and the growth of performance studies and artistic research applied to the analysis of his piano music.