Enrique Granados

Enrique Granados (Pantaleón Enrique Joaquín Granados y Campiña) (1867–1916) war born in Lleida, Catalonia. 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. 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 1903, Granados participated in a competition organized by Tomás Bretón of the Madrid Royal Conservatory, which awarded a considerable sum of 500 pesetas for the best "concert allegro" for solo piano. Granados submitted his Allegro de concierto, Op. 46, for which the jury declared him the winner with an almost unanimous vote. The win brought Granados to national attention. 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. Returning home from this performance, Granados drowned when his ship, the Sussex, was torpedoed by a German submarine. Granados wrote piano music, chamber music, songs, zarzuelas, etc. Many of his piano compositions have been transcribed for the classical guitar. He was a significant influence on at least two other famous Spanish composers and musicians, Manuel de Falla and Pablo Casals.