Valses Poeticos Piano Kalmus edition

Valses poéticos was first published, along with the Valses ntimos by the same composer, in the influential journal Ilustración musical hispano-americana (Barcelona) in 1894. Like the well-known pieces from the Suite española (Granada, Sevilla, Cataluña, etc.) by Granados' contemporary Issac Albeniz (1860-1909), Valses poéticos adapts naturally to the guitar and is now perhaps performed on guitar as much as on the original piano.

Granados was born, and lived most of his early life in Barcelona. He was trained primarily as a pianist but also studied, probably informally, with the great Spanish musicologist Felipe Pedrell (1841-1922) and it is reasonable to assume that the strong nationalist-folk element in Granados' music came to be at least partially as a result of Pedrell's influence. Like so many of his compatriots, Granados also spent some time in Paris as a young man attending classes at the conservatoire and basking in Parisian intellectual society. His music, like the music of the many composers of similar experience, is in many aspects the natural synthesis of these dual influences, local and cosmopolitan.

Granados enjoyed modest success in his lifetime, particularly in his native Barcelona but also more widely in Spain and abroad. He was invited to the United States in 1916 to attend the premier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York of his recently completed operatic work based in turn on his most famous piano piece, Goyescas. After the premier, his journey home was delayed when he accepted an invitation to meet U. S. President Woodrow Wilson at the White House. On the second part of his re-scheduled trip home, the ship he was on was torpedoed, the impact throwing Granados, his wife, and several other passengers overboard. Granados was picked up by a life boat, but seeing his wife in distress, he dove back into the water in an attempt to save her. Both were drowned.

Like the more famous Doce danzas españolas, Valses Poéticos features a fluency of melodic invention and a modest, grounded diatonicism that makes its musical discourse conspicuously unforced, lucid aristocratic and elegant at the core. In it, the waltz is explored with great inventiveness; the opening one sounds like a picture of equilibrium, there are invocations of Strauss in no.4, the Parisian cafe in no.5, a lyrical, reflective melancholy in no.6 and true exuberance in no.8.

There has long been a recognition of the adaptability of Granados' selected piano music to the guitar, starting with the great arrangements of La Maja de Goya and Dedicatoria by Granados' younger contemporary Miguel Llobet (1878-1938) and continuing through the 20th century with numerous arrangers' adaptations of the Doce danzas españolas. There may be some validity to the common notion that the success of these adaptations has to do with the essential ?Spanish? character in the music manifesting so naturally on the guitar, the essential Spanish instrument. Of course, the guitar has a strong presence in Spanish culture but it can just as readily claim France or Italy as a homeland. Moreover and more particularly, it is the delicacy of texture in the writing that makes adaptation possible and sucessful. The original score of Valses Poéticos does not prescribe a transcendental pianism, or put the range and voicing capacities of the piano at the centre of the musical oration. The elegant reserve of the writing, along with some good luck, makes idiomatic arrangement possible and even allows for maintaining the original keys and key architecture in the present arrangement.