Enrique Granados, "Valses poéticos"

"Youth everywhere is at home," wrote Enrique Granados in his Memoirs, little read but curiously, much quoted. Those were his first days in Paris. He had got lost and a parishioner took him home. The young Catalan pianist, nineteen years old, thus began, in September 1887, his brief but very profitable two-year stay in Paris. A very untimely illness deprived him of entering the Conservatory, but he studied privately with renowned Parisian pianists and music teachers. From those years are his acclaimed "Valses Poéticos" for piano, the first of his mature works.

A generous Spanish patron had brought about the miracle. A year earlier, after his father's death, Granados had found himself in need of a job as a café pianist in Barcelona. For one hundred pesetas a month, the young musician played from "two to four-thirty in the afternoon and nine to eleven-thirty at night" at the Café de las Delicias, later known as "Lion d'Or". But the café, already somewhat outdated, went from bad to worse and the pianist's position was eliminated.

Enrique Granados (11867 - 1916)

Paris and back to Barcelona
It was at that moment that the renowned businessman Eduardo Conde entered the scene, and hired Granados as his children's teacher for a generous salary, making him "the most expensive teacher in Barcelona".  Shortly thereafter, he convinced his mother that the young man should pursue studies in Paris. Two years later, Granados was back in Barcelona, having met the most representative French composers of the time, and consolidating his friendship with his compatriot Isaac Albéniz.

"Poetic waltzes", for piano

Even with what has already been pointed out, there are authors who cite its genesis in a period prior to the author's trip to Paris, when he was seventeen or eighteen years old. In any case, it is a series of seven elegant waltzes, preluded by an introduction, in four-quarter time, and closing with a colorful and ingenious coda that, surprisingly, leads to the literal and complete repetition of the first waltz.

00:00  Introducción

01:32  Melódico

03:25  Tiempo de vals noble

04:50  Tiempo de vals lento

07:02  Allegro humorístico

07:50  Allegretto (Elegante)

09:22  Quasi ad libitum (Sentimental)

11:00  Vivo - Presto

The rendition is by Spanish pianist Luis Fernando Perez. (The video includes information about Goyescas, which we assume the performer played before the Waltzes, data that the videos forgot to remove).