This week’s theme is…Odd and Tragic Deaths! Death comes to us all. And most of the time death is pretty routine, run-of-the-mill. Not that death is ever easy, but usually it’s the result of “natural causes”, which is another way of saying “a chronic disease akin to that which most people die of, and not all that interesting”. But sometimes death is traumatic, unexpected and tragic. This week, we look at examples of composers who succumbed to causes such as these
Odd and Tragic Deaths, Day 2 – Goyescas by Enrique Granados
I have a cousin who does something you might find strange. Due to a condition of some kind (inner ear, maybe?) she is unable to endure the physical experience of flying. Because of this, she once traveled overseas via an ocean liner, the Queen Elizabeth 2, a voyage that must have taken a matter of days as opposed to the matter of mere hours that the modern miracle of flight allows those of us who are able. And if half a day on an airplane seems bad (most of us cringe at the thought; granted, the close quarters and restricted motion doesn’t help), imagine being confined to what is essentially a small town for a full week with nothing but the ocean to see. Many people did it of course, and ships are still designed to make that time as pleasant and stimulating as possible. But have you thought about the pace of life a century ago? It’s faster now in so many ways. All correspondence, business and personal, would have been done by mail, which would have taken days or weeks. And if you traveled across the ocean, as many great musicians did in order to tour on the other side of the Atlantic, you were often looking at half a year of your life devoted to the endeavor, so you had better mean it and plan ahead. I wonder how far in advance concert seasons must have been planned in America to coordinate all the musicians visiting from Europe. It’s hard to imagine.
And there is one other complication with which sea travel has confronted its passengers: sinking. It’s not that common, and the story of the Titanic probably gives most of us a disproportionately high association between ocean liners and sinking. Statistically both air travel and ship travel are very safe. But there was a time when the odds of sinking while crossing the Atlantic Ocean were increased by a very powerful man-made factor: the terrible reign of the German Unterseebooten, commonly abbreviated as “U-Boats”, what English speakers call submarines.
The German U-Boats experienced their heyday during the First World War, an expression of the Germans’ increasing tendency to gravitate toward a philosophy of total war in the effort to weaken their enemies on the home front. Over the course of the war their deployment of U-Boats became increasingly unrestricted, eventually culminating in the policy known as “unrestricted submarine warfare” which disregarded the long-standing “prize rules”, a sort of chivalrous code regarding the treatment of civilians at sea, and allowed without warning the aggressive sinking of ships which carried civilian passengers and freight between the Allied powers of America, Canada, Great Britain and France. The advent of the self-propelled torpedo around this time made the strikes particularly deadly and destructive. Eventually the allies began to rely on armed escorts to protect their human and economic cargo, rendering the U-Boat strategies less effective, but not before the Germans had done significant damage to their fleets. All told, the U-Boats were responsible for the sinking of over 11 million tons of shipping during the Great War.
The most famous example of a civilian ship sunk by U-Boats is, of course, the Lusitania. Operated by the Cunard line, a British cruise line which was bought by Carnival in the late 1990s, the ship’s design was shaped by commercial rivalry between the British and the Germans over the Atlantic seaways of the early 1900s. The zippy Lusitania, outfitted with powerful engines, was designed to make the transatlantic voyage faster than her German competitors. Launched in 1906, the Lusitania completed just over 200 transatlantic voyages before being sunk off the coast of Ireland in May of 1915. This was the straw that brought the Americans into the War, largely turning its tide, as they realized their own citizens were not safe on the waterways with the international belligerence afoot. Of 139 American passengers aboard, 128 of them died in the Lusitania’s sinking.
If you’ve seen any of the movies about Titanic, a similarly ill-fated vessel, you probably have in your mind the image of a long, slow, sinking process. But the torpedoes of the U-Boats hastened the timeline considerably. Being caught aboard a ship sunk in this fashion must have been an acutely terrifying and dramatic experience, giving its passengers little time to react. Scroll to 37:20 in this video to get a sense of this:
From this it is clear that the passengers of these ocean liners knew their chances, even delighting in gallows humor as they contemplated their odds of being sunk violently by a U-Boat attack. It must simply have been a fact to face for anyone with ambitions to cross the Atlantic Ocean on an American or British ship that this voyage had a higher chance of being their last than usual, and many took that chance because life goes on. There are places to go, people to see, business to conduct, concerts to give in foreign lands, etc. And so ended the life of a promising Spanish composer and pianist, Enrique Granados, in early 1916 at the age of 49.
If you have a sense of musical nationalism, which is the forging of a style of music based largely on influences from the culture of a certain people or country, usually inspired by fervent feelings of patriotism, then you are probably familiar with the Norwegian Grieg, the Finnish Sibelius, the Czech Smetana (see this post), or any number of the Russians starting with Glinka and proceeding through the Mighty Handful (see this post and this post). But I bet you are less familiar with the Spanish nationalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Three composers in particular formed a short lineage starting with Isaac Albeniz and going through Manuel de Falla. Granados is right in between those two. All of them incorporated their beloved Spanish music and national flavors into music that featured classical forms. Granados, in addition to this, was a virtuosic pianist. His best known work is Goyescas, a massive suite of six pieces, all inspired by paintings by that most Spanish of painters (the most Spanish before Picasso, anyway), Francisco Goya, although the movements have not been linked to specific paintings. If you hear one, it should be the delicate and dreamy Maiden and the Nightingale, here performed by the ultimate Spanish pianist, Alicia de Larrocha:
In January of 1916, Granados was in New York for the premiere of his opera based on Goyescas. He was to return to Spain after that, but delayed his trip upon being invited by president Woodrow Wilson to perform at the White House (wouldn’t you?). His revised schedule found him and his wife returning to Spain via a circuitous route which took them first to England and then to France. As they were ferried across the English Channel the boat which carried them, the SS Sussex, was torpedoed by a U-Boat. Granados successfully boarded a lifeboat himself, but then observed his wife floundering in the water and dove into the Channel to save her, causing them both to drown. And so the aggressive German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare left its deep mark on the development of classical music in Spain. The tragic reach of total war was indeed total, stunting the very artistry of a nation.
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