Enrique Granados Campiña

Enrique Granados was born in Lleida. His father was a captain in the army. He studied piano in Barcelona with Joan Baptista Pujol at the Academia Pujol. Pujol had studied with the Mallorcan pianist and student of Liszt Pere Tintorer. Pujol created what could be called the first Catalan piano tradition. Among his numerous students were Albeniz, Malats and Ricard Viñes. At the age of fifteen, Granados gave his first concert in public. Granados began earning a living as a musician playing in the most emblematic cafés in the Barcelona of that time and began giving private lessons. With Felipe Pedrell he studied harmony and composition and through Pedrell he discovered popular music. This inspired Granados to compose 'Doce danzas españolas', written in 1883.

In 1887, at the age of twenty, Granados moved to Paris to study with Charles de Bériot, a professor at the Conservatory of Paris. There Granados used to go to the workshops of Catalan and French painters with whom he shared a deep love for art. In 1892 he held his first great recital in the Teatre Líric of Barcelona and in 1892 he performed the 'Concert for piano and orchestra in A minor' by Edvard Grieg for the first time in our country.

In 1901 he founded the Academia Granados which soon became the school of reference in Barcelona and where he could apply his method about sonority and use of the pedal, the first to be published in Spain. His work 'Allegro de Concierto' won first prize in the composition competition of the Conservatory in Madrid in 1904. In 1912 the Sala Granados was opened in Barcelona where many of his works was presented.

In 1911 he performed his 'Goyescas' or 'Los Majos Enamorados', for the first time. This piano suite is based on the paintings of Goya. Granados made an opera version which was performed for the first time in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in 1916. On the way back from his journey to the United States, having attended the opening night of 'Goyescas', Enrique Granados and his wife drowned when the ship 'Sussex' was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel.

Goyescas