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One of the most colorful turn-of-the-20th-century Spanish musicians, composer and pianist Enrique Granados is best remembered for his evocative solo piano works. They are so full of Iberian flavor that they are often heard transcribed for the guitar. His output also includes a great deal of orchestral music and six operas, only the last of which, Goyescas, has gained any lasting fame.

Born in 1867 to an officer in the Spanish army, Granados received his first musical instruction from an army bandmaster. Further studies in Barcelona with Francisco Jurnet (piano) and Felipe Pedrell (composition) prepared the young musician for a brief but highly influential stay in Paris (1887-1889), during which Granados worked under well-known Parisian pianist and teacher Charles de Bériot (son of the famous violinist of the same name). Granados' earliest mature work, the Valses poéticos of 1887, was completed around this time. After returning to Barcelona in 1890, Granados spent the next decade building a dual career as pianist and composer, forming a successful piano trio with Belgian violinist Mathieu Crickboom and the young Pablo Casals. His first opera, Maria del Carmen, was well-received at its premiere in 1898, after which the Order of Carlos III (a Spanish knighthood) was bestowed upon Granados by a supportive government. He was quick to follow up on this success, and two more operas were produced in the next five years. For the 1900 season, he founded the Society of Classical Concerts (Sociedad de Conciertos Clásicos) in Barcelona, which, although short-lived, gave him the confidence to create his own piano school the following year (known as the Academia Granados). The school was a success, and Granados maintained his involvement with it until his death. Granados was one of the great pianists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all his music relies heavily on the Catalan and Spanish folk idiom (e.g. Twelve Spanish Dances or Six Pieces on Spanish Folksongs), which, along with fellow Spaniard Isaac Albéniz, Granados was instrumental in bringing to the attention of the contemporary European musical establishment. The Goyescas suite, begun in 1902 but not finished until 1911, is perhaps his mightiest achievement. Granados also produced an opera of the same name; both the pianistic and operatic incarnations of the work take the striking visuals of Goya as their inspiration. In March 1916, while returning from the U.S. -- where the opera Goyescas had received a New York premiere on January 26, 1916, and where Granados had performed at the White House for President Wilson -- the liner Sussex was torpedoed by a German U-boat. Among the casualties were Granados and his wife of 24 years. ~ Blair Johnston

Part Impressionist and part neo-Classicist, Manuel de Falla is difficult to peg, but he is widely regarded as the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early 20th century. His output is small but choice and revolves largely around music for the stage. Falla's reputation is based primarily on two lavishly Iberian ballet scores: El amor brujo ("Love, the Magician"), from which is drawn the Ritual Fire Dance (a pops favorite, often heard in piano or guitar transcriptions), and the splashy El sombrero de tres picos ("The Three-Cornered Hat"). He also gained a permanent place in the concert repertory with his evocative piano concerto Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

Born in 1876, Falla first took piano lessons from his mother in Cádiz, and later moved to Madrid to continue the piano and to study composition with Felipe Pedrell, the musical scholar who had earlier pointed Isaac Albéniz toward Spanish folk music as a source for his compositions. Pedrell interested Falla in Renaissance Spanish church music, folk music, and native opera. The latter two influences are strongly felt in La Vida breve ("Life Is Short"), an opera (a sort of Spanish Cavalleria rusticana) for which Falla won a prize in 1905, although the work was not premiered until 1913. A second significant aesthetic influence resulted from his 1907 move to Paris, where he met and fell under the Impressionist spell of Claude Debussy, Paul Dukas, and Maurice Ravel. It was in Paris that Falla published his first piano pieces and songs. In 1914 he was back in Madrid, working on the application of a quasi-Impressionistic idiom to intensely Spanish subjects; El amor brujo drew on Andalusian folk music. Falla wrote another ballet in 1917, El Corregidor y la molinera ("The Magistrate and the Miller Girl"). Diaghilev persuaded him to expand the score for a ballet by Léonide Massine to be called El sombrero de tres picos, and excerpts from the full score have become a staple of the concert repertory. In between the two ballets came Nights in the Gardens of Spain, a suite of three richly scored impressions for piano and orchestra, again evoking Andalusia.

In the 1920s, Falla altered his stylistic direction, coming under the influence of Stravinsky's neo-Classicism. Works from this period include the puppet opera El retablo de Maese Pedro ("The Altarpiece of Maese Pedro"), based on an episode from Don Quixtote, and a harpsichord concerto, with the folk inspiration now Castilian rather than Andalusian. After 1926 he essentially retired, living first in Mallorca and, from 1939, in Argentina. He was generally apolitical, but the rise of fascism in Spain contributed to his decision to remain in Latin America after traveling there for a conducting engagement. He spent his final years in the Argentine desert, at work on a giant cantata, Atlántida, which remained unfinished at his death in 1946. ~ James Reel

Claude Debussy (born Achille-Claude Debussy) was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His mature compositions, distinctive and appealing, combined modernism and sensuality so successfully that their sheer beauty often obscures their technical innovation. Debussy is considered the founder and leading exponent of musical Impressionism (although he resisted the label), and his adoption of non-traditional scales and tonal structures was paradigmatic for many composers who followed.

The son of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, Debussy began piano studies at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11. While a student there, he encountered the wealthy Nadezhda von Meck (most famous as Tchaikovsky's patroness), who employed him as a music teacher to her children; through travel, concerts and acquaintances, she provided him with a wealth of musical experience. Most importantly, she exposed the young Debussy to the works of Russian composers, such as Borodin and Mussorgsky, who would remain important influences on his music.

Debussy began composition studies in 1880, and in 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. This prize financed two years of further study in Rome -- years that proved to be creatively frustrating. However, the period immediately following was fertile for the young composer; trips to Bayreuth and the Paris World Exhibition (1889) established, respectively, his determination to move away from the influence of Richard Wagner, and his interest in the music of Eastern cultures.

After a relatively bohemian period, during which Debussy formed friendships with many leading Parisian writers and musicians (not least of which were Mallarmé, Satie, and Chausson), the year 1894 saw the enormously successful premiere of his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) -- a truly revolutionary work that brought his mature compositional voice into focus. His seminal opera Pelléas et Mélisande, completed the next year, would become a sensation at its first performance in 1902. The impact of those two works earned Debussy widespread recognition (as well as frequent attacks from critics, who failed to appreciate his forward-looking style), and over the first decade of the 20th century he established himself as the leading figure in French music -- so much so that the term "Debussysme" ("Debussyism"), used both positively and pejoratively, became fashionable in Paris. Debussy spent his remaining healthy years immersed in French musical society, writing as a critic, composing, and performing his own works internationally. He succumbed to colon cancer in 1918, having also suffered a deep depression brought on by the onset of World War I.

Debussy's personal life was punctuated by unfortunate incidents, most famously the attempted suicide of his first wife, Lilly Texier, whom he abandoned for the singer Emma Bardac. However, his subsequent marriage to Bardac, and their daughter Claude-Emma, whom they called "Chouchou" and who became the dedicatee of the composer's Children's Corner piano suite, provided the middle-aged Debussy with great personal joys.

Debussy wrote successfully in most every genre, adapting his distinctive compositional language to the demands of each. His orchestral works, of which Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and La mer (The Sea, 1905) are most familiar, established him as a master of instrumental color and texture. It is this attention to tone color -- his layering of sound upon sound so that they blend to form a greater, evocative whole -- that linked Debussy in the public mind to the Impressionist painters.

His works for solo piano, particularly his collections of Préludes and Etudes, which have remained staples of the repertoire since their composition, bring into relief his assimilation of elements from both Eastern cultures and antiquity -- especially pentatonicism (the use of five-note scales), modality (the use of scales from ancient Greece and the medieval church), parallelism (the parallel movement of chords and lines), and the whole-tone scale (formed by dividing the octave into six equal intervals).

Pelléas et Mélisande and his collections of songs for solo voice establish the strength of his connection to French literature and poetry, especially the symbolist writers, and stand as some of the most understatedly expressive works in the repertory. The writings of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, and his childhood friend Paul Verlaine appear prominently among his chosen texts and joined symbiotically with the composer's own unique moods and forms of expression. ~ Allen Schrott