Granados and Goya: Artists on the Edge of Aristocracy

John W. Milton

In this article, I will describe my approach to finding the information and assembling it in order to create a narrative of the last seventeen years of Enrique Granados's life. I will also indicate the extent to which I was able to rely on solid knowledge of the principal characters, and how I needed to employ intuition and serendipity to fill the gaps.

In no case do characters appear in a scene unless there is evidence they could have been physically present, for example, during several days in September, 1912 at Pablo Casals's beach house in Sant Salvador. Photos and diaries confirm the presence of Guilhermina Suggia, Donald Tovey, Mieczyslav Horszowski, Granados, and his wife Amparo; moreover, Casals's biographer H. L. Kirk records generally what occurred. Without audio or videotapes, however, the precise scenes and dialogue had to be imagined by the author.

In the entire 608-page narrative, only a handful of minor characters appear—the author's inventions. Most were given names, but in no case is their appearance inconsistent with the narrative line.¹

Goya and the Spanish royalty

By the time he reached his mid-thirties, Francisco Goya y Lucientes was on the edge of aristocracy, living in affluence from its patronage. He had become a favorite of King Carlos III (1759-1788), who made him chief court painter, included him in his lengthy hunting parties, and gave him hunting clothes, guns, and dogs. Goya appeared to be a titled member of the royal hunting fraternity, and during the reign of Carlos III, Goya and his family lived like members of the aristocracy. Goya relished the benefits of this life style; after discovering a trace of nobility in a distant Basque relative, he added "de" before his last name. He became Francisco de Goya.

Carlos III was regarded as one of the most liberal and enlightened of the Bourbon monarchs, though not fond of the everyday grind of ruling. His habit was to leave Madrid early in January, taking the court to the countryside like a traveling circus. In April, while the court was in Aranjuez, he would hunt wildcats in the nearby mountains.

During his reign, it became fashionable to promenade in fine coaches drawn by horses from Córdoba—in fact, not unlike the setting for the first scene in Granados's opera Goyescas. Carlos III greatly improved Spain's highway system, making it easier for Goya to go from Madrid to Sanlúcar de Barrameda for his 1796 visit with María Teresa Cayetana, the XIIIth Duchess of Alba. And in his reign, a system was established for carrying people in coach-driven cabs called "diligencias"; these would later allow the Barcelona aristocracy to make the arduous journey from the end of the rail line in Ripoll to the Pyrenees resort town of Puigcerdà, and for Granados to be a frequent guest there. In the time of Carlos, dancing in public became popular, including the fandango, another legacy that appears in Goyescas.

La Duquesa de Alba

In the summer of 1796, Goya traveled by diligencia across mountains, plains and rivers, from his home in Madrid to Sanlúcar, near Cádiz. He came at the invitation of La Duquesa, whose large country house—one of seventeen residences—was in the middle of a nature preserve at the mouth of the river Guadalquivir, not far from where Cristóbal Colón left the safety of the Iberian peninsula and headed across the Atlantic, looking for the East Indies. Despite the improved roads built under Carlos III, Sanlúcar was as distant from Madrid as any place in the country, so Goya's was not a casual journey.

María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo, XIII Duquesa de Alba, had recently buried her husband. She invited Goya to stay with her during the obligatory period of mourning. María Teresa, as she preferred to be known by friends and lovers, was a stunning woman of thirty-three, childless, wealthier than the Bourbon kings, graceful and intimidating, with curly raven hair tumbling to the small of her back, dark extravagant eyes, a waist which might be encircled by a man's hands, the exquisite oval face of a porcelain doll, intelligence, wit, passion and spontaneity. She often dressed in the costume of the majas, a peasant dress with a tight waist, trim open jacket, and a towering black mantilla. This outfit exhibited a sort of Gypsy flair that appealed to those aristocratic women who dared to assail social conventions. Often surrounded by a retinue of younger men, who swarmed like bees in search of nectar, La Duquesa would flaunt her maja wardrobe at the opera and chamber music concerts in Madrid.

As official painter of the Spanish royalty, Goya had done a portrait of both La Duquesa and her late husband the previous year. After La Duquesa's first sitting for the 1795 portrait, Goya confided to a friend that she asked him to paint her face, so he accommodated her; she left his studio with it painted. "Better than painting on canvas," said Goya.² This anecdote and Goya's sketch of La Duquesa's dying husband—attended by a pair of donkeys in doctor's gowns, with a tiny figure of La Duquesa sitting on the edge of his bed—suggest a closer relationship than between artist and his subject.

When La Duquesa invited him to Sanlúcar, Goya was fifty years old and deaf, following a near-fatal illness five years earlier. As her guest, he joined a collection of outcasts upon whom she would shower love and devotion. For Goya, it was a welcome respite from the political crossfire at the court, the languor of his marriage to Josefa Bayeu, and the daily stress of coping with a raucous urban scene that for him was now soundless. He did not merely stay for a long weekend; he remained with La Duquesa for several months.

During his stay in Sanlúcar, Goya filled a notebook, "l'Álbum de Sanlúcar," with pen and ink drawings depicting the daily life of La Duquesa and her household. The drawings suggest an intimacy with Goya, or at least that she allowed him to be with her and see her in the most unguarded of poses. Goya portrayed her in daily life, in intimate moments where she allowed him to be present: leaning out of a window with her nightdress barely covering her breasts, pulling up a stocking in her lingerie with legs parted, lying in bed with knees raised and just a sheet to cover her naked body, lifting her skirt to flaunt a bare bottom, sitting naked on the edge of a bathtub, swinging her uncovered legs out of bed, and having her long tresses combed by a servant girl.

Along with these portrayals of life at Sanlúcar, there's the amazing 1797 portrait of La Duquesa that hangs in the Hispanic Society of America in New York, dressed in black (not so much funereal as majista), her index finger sporting a ring etched with "Alba," next to one with "Goya," and pointing to the words etched in the Sanlúcar sand: "Solo Goya"—the artist's desire that she be his, only his, which she never truly was.

After Sanlúcar, La Duquesa began an affair with the torero Pedro Romero, followed by a series of liaisons with a wide variety of men, including Manuel de Godoy, Spain 's prime minister. From this point on, Goya's depictions of her were less idyllic, often filled with bitterness and rage. In the next two years, Goya created the series of eighty Caprichos, some from the drawings he made in Sanlúcar, sharpened by his growing disenchantment with the cruelties and idiosyncrasies of the Spanish nobility. One of them showed Goya groveling in front of La Duquesa with the caption: "Which of them is more overcome?" In another she was being carried off on the backs of three men, one of them resembling Pedro Romero. In a third sketch, she was a double-headed creature, with one face toward Goya and the other staring up at the sky.

Many scholars and biographers of Goya dispute the contention that he and La Duquesa were lovers, though some, like Susann Waldmann, lean toward accepting that. In Waldmann's view, Goya's sketches suggest an intimacy between them, but she reflects that it is almost irrelevant to wonder whether Goya had an affair with her.³

Discovering Goya

In his recent biography of Granados, Walter Clark describes the rediscovery of Goya during the late nineteenth century, especially after the disastrous war against the United States.⁴ Miguel de Unamuno's notion of "casticismo," the collective vocation of the best talent in Spain , was something discovered by "Europeanized Spaniards."

According to Joseph Jones of the University of Kentucky, writing for Dieciocho, in the wake of a disastrous 1898 war against the United States, "Spanish thinkers and artists began to seek reasons for Spain's failure to hold onto its empire. They sought to identify what in Spanish culture and tradition needed to be revived in order to restore Spain to her former importance as a great power; they longed to find historical models for the nations' leaders . . . they saw parallels between American aggression in '98 and the French invasion nine decades earlier . . . (and) out of this process, Francisco Goya and the dramatist Ramón de la Cruz emerged as heroes."⁵

The heart of the nation was in the vast plain of Castilla, protected by mountains, distance and harsh climatic changes. Its aorta was Madrid. Clark writes that "Granados's highly romantic and nostalgic attraction to Castile, Madrid and the epoch of Goya would find expression in a musical language that was thoroughly modern and thoroughly Spanish, casticista and European at the same time."⁶

Granados's attraction to Goya's art seems to have been kindled by a visit to El Prado with Periquet in 1898. Since his ambition was to convert the art of Goya to music—and several of the scenes in Goyescas were based on the Capricho—my conclusion is that he admired Goya's satirical cutting edge against the rich and powerful of the aristocracy in Madrid, just as he could observe the foibles and defects of the alta burguesia of Barcelona in his own day. How could one view the Caprichos and not see the imbedded satirical edge?

Granados and Periquet were trying to revive what they considered a long-ignored national treasure, the tonadilla (whose apogee had been during 1770-90, the time of composers such as Pablo Esteve and Blas de Laserna). Granados lifted the piece "La tirana del Trípili" from Laserna to form the basis for "Los requiebros," the first part of Book One of Goyescas.

Looking for popular recognition?

Doubtless, Granados was inspired by the art of Goya, and genuinely interested in creating music "from the heart of Spain." A much-quoted letter to pianist Joaquim Malats displays Granados's effervescence. "I fell in love with Goya's psychology, and with his palette. With him and with La Duquesa de Alba; with his lady Maja, with his models, with his quarrels, his loves and his flirtations."⁷

But beyond its emotional impact on Granados, the second coming of Goya had stirred the heart of the entire country in the 1890s and early 1900s. So understandably, Granados would have seen the potential for music which might not only capture the Goya-esque fancy of his homeland, but also be acclaimed by audiences and critics.

And what choice did he have? His hopes had been dashed when Barcelona audiences, while stirred by Catalanisme, failed to embrace his Catalan lyric works. Also, orchestral and chamber music were not widely enjoyed in his homeland; choral works and adaptations of Catalan folk music were politically charged; and the Spanish audience for opera strongly preferred zarzuelas, the Italians, or—in Barcelona—Wagner.

In my book, The Fallen Nightingale, history and fiction are interwoven in a narrative interpretation of Granados's process as he recognized this opportunity:

Granados returns to the challenge of converting Goya's oils on canvas and ink on paper to piano music, as the spirit of the painter roams again in his homeland. A wave of rediscovery sweeps across the Iberian peninsula , just as the idea of Goya-esque music stirs again within Granados. Not only is Goya's body repatriated from Bordeaux to Madrid , his depictions of the war against Napoleon are now molded into a pride-swelling patriotism in the wake of the disastrous war of 1898.

Granados keeps circling back to the Caprichos and Goya's satirical targets: contrived marriage among the privileged class in which the bride and groom were pawns in a game of chess; victimizing young women by marrying them off to unattractive older rich men; betrayal by lovers; lives full of pretense; failure to judge the real value of people; and using charm to deceive. In the sketch "Tal para qual," Goya satirized the Queen and her lover, Godoy. In another he showed La Duquesa, with butterfly wings atop her head, being transported by three me—perhaps a metaphor for Goya's discovery that she was addicted to 'a powder from the Andes' which put butterflies in her head but warded off demons."

Here we are at the fine line between reliance on tangible data, and this author's intuition:

Granados also admires Goya for remaining an observer of the sanguinary struggle for power over Spain, and for unceasing adherence to his art. Goya hunted with the aristocrats, sat in their tertulias, dined at their tables, drank their wines and spirits, slept with some of their women, and watched them plot against each other. As a keen observer in these lofty circles, he took what he'd seen and converted it to the art of oils and ink. Never belonging to the circles.

As Douglas Riva makes clear in his presentation, Granados made a number of black and white sketches, titled "Apuntes para mis obras": sketches of majas, including one that presages the scene in "Coloquio en la reja" of Goyescas. The subject matter is Goya-esque, but though it is commonly thought that the sketches of Granados were the result of his fascination with Goya, my research suggests a different interpretation.

Granados's affinity for sketching went back at least to 1887-89, his years as a student in Paris. During that time, he was a frequent visitor at the atelier of the Barcelona-born painter Francisco Miralles, who had lived and worked in Paris for many years. Granados wanted to improve his talent for sketching, and he was fascinated by the exotic, bohemian lifestyle of Miralles and his anisette-swilling coterie. To me, it is plainly evident that Granados's devotion to sketching began at least eleven years before he and Fernando Periquet visited the Prado. Long before his fascination with Goya.

Granados and the aristocracy

Like his friends Isaac Albéniz and Pau Casals, Granados was able to find patronage among the aristocracy. This was characteristic of a transition taking place in the late nineteenth century, when artists of every medium were striving to become independent of the royal courts, to become self-reliant by performing, displaying, selling, or publishing their art, or teaching others to develop their talents.⁸

After early patronage from Queen Victoria and Count Guillermo Morphy got him a jump-start in Paris, Casals's ability to establish himself as the premier performer of works for violoncello meant he never became reliant on teaching others in order to pay the bills. Albéniz essentially lived comfortably off the English banker and librettist Francis Money-Coutts during the last fifteen years of his life. And though he alone of these three depended on teaching to support his family, for most of his adult life Granados lived on the edge of the alta burguesia of Catalunya. Not unlike the way Goya managed to stay close to the royal court of his time.

It began with Eduardo Condé, prosperous owner of the large "El Siglo" department store, located on Rambla de Catalunya. Through Granados's older sister Concepción (Zoe), who worked at "El Siglo," Condé learned of her brother's pianistic talent, and the family's financial need after the death of their father. The merchant hired the eighteen-year-old to teach his children to play, and as Granados would recall it, he went from being an underpaid, unappreciated, and overstressed bar pianist at the Café de las Delicias to the best-paid piano teacher in Barcelona. Then, when Granados aspired to go to Paris for advanced training, Condé staked him to two years in the French capital.

Salvador Andreu i Grau and Carmen Miralles de Andreu were Granados's most important patrons. Based on long-term friendships which began in the 1880s, it was Salvador and Carmen who stepped forward every time Granados articulated a new phase of his dream: establishment of l'Acadèmia Granados in 1901 at Carrer Fontanella, 14; expansion of the academy when it moved to Carrer Girona, 89 and later to Girona, 20; and construction of the Sala Granados in 1912, on Avinguda Tibidado, 18. Financially, Granados became dependent on the Andreus; socially, he became their "satellite," at the Andreu villa in Sant Gervasi and at Xalet Andreu in the Pyrenees town of Puigcerdà.

Granados also became linked with the Godós from the textile center Igualada, part of another prominent Catalan family. From 1902, when Clotilde Godó Pelegrí became a student at his newly created academy, until his departure for New York at the end of 1915, her presence in his life was an important factor, artistically and personally.

In addition, after their first meeting in Barcelona in November 1912, American pianist Ernest Schelling was a friend and benefactor of great significance in the final years of Granados's life. It was Schelling who arranged for Goyescas to be selected by l'Opera de Paris in 1914, and when the World War shattered that dream, managed to convince the Metropolitan Opera to give the work its world premiere. And while staying at Schelling's luxurious chalet in Céligny, Granados watched in horror as the European war engulfed friends and colleagues such as Fritz Kreisler, Jan Paderewski, Mathieu Crickboom, Jacques Thibaud, and Maurice Ravel.

From their meeting after his concert at Salle Pleyel in Paris, Robert Bliss, a U.S. diplomat based in Paris, and his wife Mildred also became influential friends and benefactors of Granados. (Mildred Bliss was the penultimate person to try to help Granados return safely to Barcelona in March 1916).

Finally, there was Archer Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America in New York. It was Huntington whom Schelling convinced to be the "angel" for the Metropolitan production of Goyescas, without whose subsidy the Met's impresario Gatti-Casazza would have succeeded in blocking it from reaching the stage.

This list of rich and powerful persons who befriended, adopted, and benefited Granados excludes the Spanish royal family, which decorated him in Madrid during the staging of María del Carmen in 1898. There was no financial reward in that. In fact, his having to purchase a new outfit in order to be presented to the royal court was recalled by Granados as costing him more than he could afford. (This honor clearly bore the fingerprints of Casals, who was in Madrid in 1898-99 and helped Granados in rehearsals for his opera. Casals was a favorite of Count Morphy, secretary to the late King Alfonso XII, and of the Queen Regent, María Cristina, who decorated Granados with the Cross of Carlos III, the same ruler who had been Goya's most important benefactor.)

The Andreu connection

Salvador Andreu and Carmen Miralles were demonstrably the most important people to provide patronage and an aristocratic lifestyle for Granados during the last two decades of his life. Notwithstanding a basic loyalty to his wife and children, a sense of honor and responsibility to support them, and a chivalrous loyalty which was most evident in the final minutes of his life, from the mid-1890s Granados spent nearly every weekday evening at the Andreu villa in Sant Gervasi before returning to his home, and spent most of his summer vacation, without his family, at the Andreus' chalet in Puigcerdà.

Salvador Andreu i Grau (1841-1928) was an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur and a lover of the arts from boyhood, who actively collected paintings and patronized musicians. He did not inherit his fortune: his father was a notario. Respectable, but a lower-ranked profession. Salvador graduated from pharmacy school, then went on to earn a doctorate in pharmacy, with a shrewd sense that the title "Doctor Andreu" could serve to differentiate his products and services from those of competitors. In effect, he created what would become a very successful "brand' for products he invented, and a chain of pharmacies that dominated the Barcelona market. He was alert enough to sense that clients would flock to modern, attractive, and conveniently located drug stores that offered better service.

All of these, of course, are commonly recognized principles of successful retailing in our day, but in Andreu's time they were radical departures from tradition. Ironically, since the ingredients of his success were poorly understood, it was rumored that his success was somehow derived from something not quite proper, something shady, sinister, possibly illegal. In fact, this conjecture persisted even to the year 2002, when an article in the Barcelona daily El Periódico suggested that he might have been "El gran Gatsby català."

In 1867, Andreu introduced his first successful product: a chest salve (pasta pectoral), on which he built a large pharmaceutical empire. Thinking beyond the Pyrenees, where his countrymen's vision usually stopped, he invaded the European market, then trained four young salesmen to travel to Latin America and establish markets for his products there. His cough pills were so ubiquitous that whenever someone began coughing during a performance at the opera house El Liceu, the inevitable cry would ring out: "pastilles del Doctor Andreu." (These tiny tablets, "Joanolas," are still sold over the counter in Spanish pharmacies.)

Andreu was active in pharmacy associations, and was a powerful lobbyist. After he expanded into real estate, he convinced the municipal authorities to extend Carrer Balmes from Diagonal all the way to Sant Gervasi, his first development. So prominent did he become that he was offered a royal title; he turned it down, as did the richest Catalan of that time, Manuel Girona i Agrafel.

But Andreu was never too busy for music. In his homes, there were invariably large music salons. His tertulias included Marià Obiols, music director of El Liceu, Pablo de Sarasate, Crickboom, Albéniz, Màrius Calado, Francesc Tàrrega, and Granados. Andreu enjoyed playing the harmonium, often with Juan Monturiol, son of the inventor of the world's first submarine. During the summer festival in Puigcerdà, he and Granados would assemble an impromptu orchestra that drafted family members, house guests, and neighbors to rehearse and perform for the celebrants of the fiesta. Granados was its permanent music director.

The Andreus' chalet in Puigcerdà could accommodate up to forty-five overnight guests, not including the host family. Over the years, these included the poet Joan Maragall, Marshall Joffre of France (the savior of Paris in 1914), artists Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas, and the family of designer Francesc Vidal.

Like a Big Sister

Carmen Miralles i Galaup (1863-1944) was a teenager when her family moved to Paris; she finished her education there and was ever after a Francophile. If the oft-told story of their being next door neighbors can be believed, she and Granados met between 1874 (when Granados's family moved to Barcelona from Tenerife in the Islas Canarias) and 1882 (when Carmen married Salvador Andreu). That story stands up if the Miralles family lived primarily in Paris but also kept a residence in Barcelona. During those years, Granados would have been 7 to 15 and Carmen 11 to 19. With Carmen being an aspiring harpist, they had a mutual devotion to music. From his own recollections of her during that period, it is likely that Granados was smitten with adolescent infatuation.

During 1887-89, Granados and Carmen could have seen each other in her brother Francisco's atelier, during her frequent visits to stay with her parents in Paris. Since she was one of brother's favorite models for his painting, and Granados was a frequent visitor at the atelier, it is reasonable to suppose that they remained in touch, albeit in an "older sister, younger brother relationship," decidedly not a romantic one.⁹

The friendship with Salvador developed after Granados's return from Paris, and according to family accounts, his frequent visits to the Andreu home began so that the Andreu children could receive proper musical instruction. There were three pianos at the Sant Gervasi villa: a Pleyel, a Bechstein, and a Chassaigne Frères, made in Barcelona.

Open to new ideas

During Granados's time, it was common for rich and powerful "bones familias" of Barcelona to have "satellites," i.e., persons who were treated as members of an extended family. Granados was the most prominent of these with the Andreus. In addition to being music teacher, he was revered as an uncle by the children, especially after the death of Francisco Miralles. In the business of l'Acadèmia Granados, he was Salvador's partner, a key employee expected to understand that Salvador's generosity was not to be squandered, to see that the school was managed competently, and that accounts with the families of students were collected promptly.

So, given this panoply of relationships with the Andreus, it is not surprising that he would spend most weekday evenings with them, instead of going home to his wife and family. As their satélite, he was essentially on call for his patrons. It also seems obvious that Granados enjoyed the Andreus' affluent lifestyle, and was adept at compartmentalizing his life to keep everyone separated: family, patrons, colleagues and friends, students, and lovers. This is evident in the fact that the Andreus rarely saw his wife, Amparo, and though of roughly the same age, the Granados children were virtually unknown to the children of Salvador and Carmen.

Was this not similar to the separation between Goya's friends and patrons in the royal court, and his wife and son?

Clotilde Godó Pelegrí

At seventeen, and recently graduated from colegio, Clotilde came to l'Acadèmia Granados at the end of its first school year, in the summer of 1902. She was auditioned by Granados and accepted as a student. After one year, she left the academy to marry Juan Marsans, of the banking family. The marriage, arranged and promoted by her mother, but unwanted by the bride, took place in the summer of 1903. After three years of marriage, birthing a son and a daughter who both died in infancy, and suffering extensive verbal and physical abuse at the hands of Marsans, she left him and returned to her family's Barcelona home on Rambla de Catalunya. She cared for her terminally ill mother until she died, then turned to her father—who never liked Marsans—and asked for help in obtaining an annulment of the marriage. Juan Godó i Llucià, owner of a large textile factory in Igualada, mayor of that city, and a member of the Catalan and national parliaments, also had influence with the Spanish church hierarchy. With this, and a valise full of pesetas, the annulment was granted, personally, by Pope Pius X.

So, at twenty-one, Clotilde was single again, older and wiser than her chronological age, and uncomfortable living back in the family home. Once again, her father solved the problem by purchasing a vacation villa in the nearby village of Tiana, from a relative who was too busy to enjoy it. Clotilde moved there and began a new life as a single woman with her own home, out of the whirl of Barcelona society, with a piano de cola which Granados purchased at the Salle Pleyel in Paris at the request of her father, and a Bechstein, which was given to her by an uncle.

During Tiana's village festival in late summer of 1906, when Granados joined Albéniz and Malats in a concert, she asked her former maestro to be readmitted to his academy. In the nine years that followed, Clotilde's relationship with Granados progressed from student to confidant to collaborator to romantic partner.

Just as in the relationship between Goya and La Duquesa de Alba, opinion is not unanimous that Granados and Clotilde were romantically involved, but the evidence for that is substantial:

1) Environment. In Barcelona, it was not uncommon for men to have lovers outside of marriage, and if pursued with discretion, most people accepted it;

2) Collegial attitudes. Other artists and musicians led a "bohemian" life-style, even Casals, except when he was in Barcelona;

3) Opportunity. As maestro and student, they could make personal time available after piano lessons. With Clotilde living in Tiana, off the beaten track, there was unlimited opportunity;

4) Granados's history. There had been several previous liaisons between the married Granados and female students and/or admirers;

5) Clotilde's history. She had been married, given birth to two children who died in infancy, and petitioned to have her marriage annulled. She was a grown woman, not innocent prey for the maestro;

6) Attraction. Granados was widely regarded as among the most attractive men in Barcelona. Clotilde was attractive, energetic, enthusiastic, and talented enough to be interesting to him. Both were well read and fond of reciting poetry. In other words, they were intellectual peers;

7) First edition. When the first (and limited) edition of Book One of Goyescas was published in 1911, Granados gave Clotilde the copy inscribed with the number '2" (King Alfonso XIII received number "1"). Other family members, friends and colleagues received higher numbers;

8) Collaboration. Their collaboration on Goyescas during the summer of 1910 added depth to the relationship;

9) Access. Even with a suspicious wife, Granados could take a train from Barcelona to Montgat and be picked up by Clotilde, the first woman in Catalunya to have a driver's license. Later, he could take his motorcycle to Tiana. Either way, it was no more than a forty-minute trip;

10) Observations by contemporaries. Paquita Madriguera, a lifelong friend of Clotilde, was the primary source, writing articles from firsthand observations, including a scene in which she surprised the lovers at the Sala Granados in 1912. (Interviews with Paquita's sister, Mercedes, confirmed this interpretation of events.) Also, the Andreu descendents were told there was a serious romance in the last years of Granados's life, and his grandson Antoni Carreras confirmed it to me in an interview in 2000;

11) Retrospective observations. Photos of Granados and Clotilde, found in the archives of the Museu de la Música in Barcelona, were regarded by museum staff as pointing to more than a maestro-student relationship: the photos were obviously staged, with Clotilde dressed as a maja. The woman displays a striking resemblance to photos of Clotilde in the Igualada newspaper in her teens. Her grandniece, Elena Godó Oriol, who was a neighbor and confidant of Clotilde during the last twenty years of her life, was positive—after viewing the photos at the museum—that the woman was indeed her great aunt;

12) Goya parallels. Given Granados's fascination with maja/o culture of Madrid, and the rumored relationship between Goya and Duquesa de Alba, he was apparently tempted to stage a reenactment one hundred years later. In staging the photos, Goya's Capricho 5, "Tal para qual," was placed on the music stand of the piano;

13) Other evidence. Granados was reportedly obsessed with returning to Barcelona from New York in 1916, and willing to risk passing through the war zone rather than waiting another month for a Spanish vessel which would haven taken him directly to the harbor a few blocks from his home;

14) "Sueños del poeta." In jacket notes for his recording of Granados's "Sueños del poeta," from Escenas poéticas, composed in 1912, Douglas Riva observes that its music was taken from the "Coloquio" scene in Goyescas. The verse has been attributed to Apel.les Mestres, but his name is not on the score (as it was on Granados's other works for which Mestres was the librettist). Plausibly, the verse could have been written by Granados himself. This is an excerpt from the verse:

In the garden of cypresses and roses,
Leaning against the pedestal of white marble
The poet slept, waiting for the moment,
While at his side, caressing his brow,
The muse watches over him.

This precisely describes the garden at Clotilde's home on Carrer Edith Llaurona in Tiana.

Conclusion: while some of these factors might be interpreted differently, or challenged, it is difficult to believe they are all erroneous. Conversely, to make a convincing case that the relationship between Granados and Clotilde did not include romance and intimacy would seem quite difficult.

Comparisons, Goya and Granados

Undeniably, there were similarities in the lives of Goya and Granados. Some were coincidences which reveal little of the two characters, and assume importance only if Granados was aware of and influenced by them.

Coincidence: the relative ages of the artists and their loved ones. When Goya met the Duquesa de Alba in 1785, he was thirty-nine, she was twenty-three—sixteen years younger; when Granados met Clotilde in 1902, he was thirty-five, she was seventeen—eighteen years younger.

Coincidence: Carlos III brought Goya into the court, and this led to commissions to do portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, then to the Albas; in the same way, Eduardo Conde's patronage enabled Granados to study in Paris and return with some of the credibility and mystique necessary to establish himself in Barcelona. The more intriguing question is: was Granados conscious of similarities between his life and Goya's, and if so, did this influence his own artistic expression?

We know that Granados admired Goya for unceasing adherence to his art. Goya was a satélite who enjoyed his position. As a keen observer in the lofty circles of his time, he took what he had seen and converted it to the art of oils and ink. Without ever belonging to the circles.

From the staged photos, it is evident that Granados was inspired by parallels in his relationship with Clotilde and Goya's with the Duquesa de Alba. But whereas La Duquesa provoked some of Goya's greatest art by throwing him over for a torero, Granados was seeking more: inspiration from a woman who would be student, friend, confidant, and romantic partner.

Some of Goya's finest work was inspired or provoked by La Duquesa: of the sketches he made at Sanlúcar, several later emerged in the Caprichos, and in the voluptuous lines of the majas . La Duquesa was a muse of Goya, light and dark; in Granados's life, there was no muse until 1910 to inspire and provoke him.

Composing Goyescas

In my book, I felt obliged to explain how Granados's masterpiece, Goyescas, was composed. In so doing, there is a fine line between available data and, if you will, poetic license.

My primary sources for the process of composing Goyescas were interviews with Clotilde Godó's grand niece, Elena Godó Oriol, and documents which she inherited from her great aunt. Also, I listened to the audiotape recorded by Clotilde in 1985 when she celebrated her 100th birthday, affirming that the Goyescas piano suite was composed in her home in Tiana, on the Pleyel and Bechstein pianos in her music salon. (In the same audio tape, Clotilde related that she paid for the ocean passage to New York for Granados's wife Amparo so that she could attend the world premiere of the opera Goyescas. Had she not, Granados would most likely have survived the return passage to Barcelona).

Conclusions

My intent has been to show how reconstructing the last two decades of Granados's life reveals parallels with the life of Goya. Both were artists who lived on the edge of aristocracy, both benefited from its patronage, and both took advantage of it to further their careers. Being on the edge exposed them to life inside the circle of privilege, but neither was corrupted by it. Being on the edge brought them into contact with two remarkable women, both nonconformists, who influenced their art.

¹ For most of the information about Granados's relationships with key benefactors, the author relied on interviews of and documents provided by their descendents: Dionisio Conde Gali, great grandson of Eduardo Conde; nine descendents of Salvador Andreu and Carmen Miralles; Elena Godó Oriol, grand niece of Clotilde Godó Oriol; and Antoni Carreras i Granados, grandson of the composer. In the case of Robert and Mildred Bliss, who were childless, the archives at Harvard University were the principal source; for Henry and Lucie Schelling, also childless, the author relied mainly on the collection of the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland; sources on Archer Huntington were readily available at the Hispanic Society of America, supplemented by an interview with his successor, Ted Beardsley.

²Excerpt from a letter from Goya to his childhood friend Martín Zapater, ca. 1794. From Susann Waldmann, Goya and the Duchess of Alba (Munich: Prestel, 1998), 20. Waldmann's source is Angel Canellas López, ed., Francisco de Goya: Diplomatario (Saragossa, 1981), Addenda, 35, no. 196.

³ Waldmann, Goya and the Duchess of Alba, 50.

⁴ Walter Aaron Clark, Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

⁵ Joseph R. Jones, "Recreating Eighteenth-century Musical Theater: The Collaborations of the Composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) and the Librettist Fernando Periquet y Zuaznábar (1873-1940)," Dieciocho 23/2 (Fall 2000): 184.

⁶ Clark, Enrique Granados, 112.

⁷ Letter dated December 11, 1910 (Museu de la Música, Barcelona, fons Granados, 10.034)

⁸ An analysis of this transition can be found in a book by economic historian Frederic M. Scherer, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

⁹ Life in Francisco's atelier is described by R. Santos Torruella in El Pintor Francisco Miralles (Barcelona: Editorial RM, 1974), xiii-xix. The landscape by Granados, still hanging in Flora Klein Andreu's villa, is reproduced in this book.