Catalan composer Enrique Granados. Analysis of the three concert songs: La Boyra (1900), Cansó d’amor (1902) and Elegia eterna (1912)

The aim of this paper is to provide a vision of Enrique Granados removed from the flat perspective of his labelling as a “Spanish nationalist composer” by means of the contextualisation and musical analysis of three Catalan songs chosen for their uniqueness and stylistic interest: La Boyra (1900), Cansó d’amor (1902) and Elegia eterna (1912), all written during the modernist artistic period. For Enrique Granados, or Enrich Granados as he
signed his letters in Catalan, the composition of work in the Catalan language was a habitual action from his beginnings as a musician, and this practice found its resonance in the sociocultural context of Barcelona at the turn of the century. The structural and stylistic characteristics of the three songs will be viewed alongside the rest of the voice and piano work of this composer, in Castilian Spanish and in Catalan, in order to describe the variety and unity of style of Granados’ repertoire.