Enrique Granados

Goyescas

The pianist and composer Enrique Granados y Campina (Lérida 1867) studied composition with Pedrell in Barcelona. He went to Paris in 1887 to study the piano with de Beriot. In 1901 he founded his own piano school in Barcelona. Granados and his wife died on their way back from America when the passenger ship 'Sussex' was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Channel on 24 March 1916. As a composer he became the founder of the specific Spanish national music. He was most of all inspired by the Spanish capital and more precisely by the Madrid of Francisco Goya. In 1911 he composed two piano albums 'Goyescas', inspired by paintings and tapestries of the painter Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), famous for his brillant originality and bizarre imagination. Later on he developed this music into an opera, based on a libretto by Fernando Periquet.