The best biographies are often the result of an obsession. And then there are those driven by a love of art, which adds a plus to any artist’s profile. Writer Marta San Miguel (Santander, 1981), journalist and José Hierro Poetry Prize winner, has novelized the life of Enric Granados (1867-1916), alternating the not-so-well-known story of the composer from Lleida with a narrative that follows his footsteps from a contemporary perspective.
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The author fell in love with classical music listening to a piece by Granados as a child. There was a lot of background music at home. She heard it as she heard her parents’ voices or the elevator motor. Suddenly, one day the Danza Oriental played, which made her lift her head.
Granados dreamed of inventing a cable car so he wouldn’t have to sail to Mallorca
“I was 13 or 14 years old and became aware that I was listening to music. I got up, opened the CD cover, a compilation of composers, and took out the booklet. Enrique Granados. Then I read his biography which, unfortunately, we have contained in the tragedy of his death. It shocked me. What happened to him is so tragic and painful and so beautiful that, hearing that piece, the epitome of a beauty that overwhelmed me, the story stayed inside me.”
San Miguel took years to write it. If she had published Última escala (Libros de Asteroide) ten years earlier, for the centenary of Granados’ tragic death, it would have made more commercial sense. But with this latest approach to the renovator of Spanish music at the turn of the century, she seeks something else: “I am not a historian or biographer, but let’s cheat a little the bad luck he had and hit play. Because outside the music world we have lost Granados. He is barely programmed. And I do not intend to rescue him, but to answer the question of what music does to us inside.”
Let’s cheat a little the bad luck Granados had and hit ‘play’”
Marta San Miguel
author of ‘Última escala’
The book starts with the dramatic death of the musician and his wife, Amparo Gal, in 1916. They were returning from the premiere of Goyescas in New York when the ship Sussex they were traveling on was torpedoed in the English Channel. There are thousands of versions of what happened: they were in a lifeboat; he was rowing; she fell into the water and he jumped in to save her despite being a poor swimmer. Or he fell and she jumped… Granados’ death has overshadowed his life and San Miguel wants to reconstruct it by weaving her own experience with the composer’s life path and his music. And without falling into esotericism, she probes that heartbeat the master had all his life: “The sea will kill me,” he said.
When he had to travel to Mallorca with the Crickboom Quartet, Granados dreamed of inventing a cable car so he wouldn’t have to sail to the island. “But maestro, if one day you have to give a concert in the U.S., what will you do?” “Of course, not go,” he replied.
In her research in Barcelona or Paris, or in the archives of La Vanguardia, San Miguel has confirmed a revealing detail: Granados used to go for walks in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris until one day, as his colleague Ricard Viñas recounts, he got into a boat and learned to row. “He was an adventurer, it is not unlikely that he rowed during the Sussex shipwreck, despite his fear of water – points out the biographer –. And I have found photos of him attending gatherings at Rusiñol’s house where he is in a little boat.”
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As a child, Granados’ parents thought he was silly because he made clownish acts and imitations, he was very arty and intense. One day he arranged the spittoons in the house in order and with two wooden spoons reproduced the military march. That’s when the parents saw there was something.
“Now we have gone too far and every child is very smart, but how could people tell there was mastery? Would Granados have gotten so far if he hadn’t met Eduardo Conde, who funded his trip to Paris?” asks the author.
Restless man, he painted in Paris. The beautiful sketches of Goyescas are his. He lived for a few months in Montmartre. “All his paintings had water motifs. The premonition goes beyond,” adds San Miguel, who interviewed Valentina Granados, the great-granddaughter, who grew up with the stories told by Aunt Natalia. “She told me he was terrified of water, which made him think he would die in it. But there are too many coincidences in Granados’ life that make him be on that boat at that moment. Chain of events since his childhood.”
What kind of man did he have to be to raise a son, Enrique Granados Gal, who loved water and studied to be a sailor? And who, after the tragedy, was forbidden by his guardians to continue and became a swimming coach and introduced the crawl style in Spain?
What surprised the biographer most is “how such an established artist could doubt himself so much. At the same time he was able to identify the quality of a pianist with four chords, he was unable to see his own quality.” “He was so afraid, so nervous and doubted so much, that he fought against himself. He got lost in those struggles to make a name, compose, be a pianist, set up the school… He gave many charity concerts: for the children of reservists, during the Tragic Week, for music education… And Amparo Gal, the heroine, is always behind everything. In the staging of Goyescas at the Metropolitan they ended up calling her Amparo del Maestro, Pau Casals says. She was his anchor and his rudder.”
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