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GRABBING GRANADOS

A huge boat is sink­ing in The Eng­lish Chan­nel. A man is cling­ing on to the side of a tiny raft, only big enough for one woman to kneel on. Soon, both drown in sight of other pas­sen­gers.

Ac­cord­ing to wit­ness Daniel Sar­gent, this is what hap­pened to Cata­lan com­poser and pi­anist Enric Grana­dos i Campiña and his wife Am­paro Gal, who was too heavy to get into a lifeboat. Grana­dos ap­par­ently re­fused to leave her alone in the sea and trag­i­cally on March 24, 1916 their six chil­dren be­came or­phans.

In this ill-fated transat­lantic cross­ing, re­turn­ing from a tour, the boat they’d been on (the French-flagged Sus­sex) was mis­taken for an enemy minelayer craft and tor­pe­doed and sunk by the Ger­mans. Only days ear­lier Grana­dos had been play­ing piano in the White House for US Pres­i­dent Woodrow Wil­son.

Born in Lleida in 1867 and the son of a colonel (orig­i­nally from Span­ish Cuba) and a Gali­cian mother, at the age of 10 he began to study music and gave pub­lic con­certs in his home­town (though his first major recital was in 1890, when he was 23 years old.) Still a child, he moved to Barcelona and was en­rolled at the Es­cola­nia de la Merced.

As is so often the case though with his­tor­i­cal fig­ures, myths and dis­agree­ment sur­round im­por­tant areas of Grana­dos’ life. The fi­nan­cial im­pact of his fa­ther’s pre­ma­ture death at just 57 is un­clear but it seems likely that his mother re­ceived the cor­rect widow’s mil­i­tary pen­sion and kept the wolves from the door in this way.

What is known is that Enric got a job play­ing piano for five hours a day at the Café de las Deli­cias, but around the time he moved his ivory tin­kling gig to the Café Fil­ipino, the Cata­lan im­pre­sario Ed­uardo Condé was also fund­ing him to a very pretty tune as music teacher of his chil­dren.

In fact, many of the best Cata­lan pi­anists of re­cent times came out of the music acad­emy in Barcelona that bore Grana­dos’ name. The in­sti­tu­tion be­came a cen­tre for a the­o­ret­i­cal-prac­ti­cal method for piano ped­als that Grana­dos had de­vel­oped from the teach­ings he’d held onto from liv­ing in Paris two years be­fore.

His mas­ter­piece as a com­poser is the suite for piano “Goyescas” (1912-14) in­spired by works of the Span­ish painter Fran­cisco de Goya. Par­tially first per­formed at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera House in New York, it helped lead to his White House tri­umph. De­spite these kinds of suc­cess, Grana­dos went on to suf­fer from ex­treme stage fright later in his per­form­ing life, ac­cord­ing to one source, even beg­ging that he not be forced to play.

I wanted to know more about this man with the fruity name, his name hav­ing been given to one of my favourite streets in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal. With only one slow lane of traf­fic, it’s a gen­tly slop­ing oasis of near-calm and al­most-quiet when all around is every­thing but that, lined with su­perb restau­rants and quaint lit­tle spe­cial­ity shops or delis at both ends.

I grab any op­por­tu­nity to walk up or down this street. Some­times I go out of my way to be on it, a part of it, while I think about the man too these days.

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