The Hispanic Grainger: Encounters with the Modern Spanish School

Percy Grainger is not normally associated with the music of Spain, yet as a pianist he saw himself as a pioneer in promoting the music of the modern Spanish school in the English-speaking world. Throughout his career Grainger repeatedly presented Isaac Albéniz as the greatest of all Spanish composers, one who had made ‘the most important contribution to pianism since the Chopin-Liszt period’. ¹ Grainger’s performance and promotion of the piano music of Albéniz and engagement with Spanish culture was undoubtedly stimulated by his friendship with the cosmopolitan American artist and Hispanophile John Singer Sargent. However, such interest in Spain also coincided with a growing fascination with Hispanic culture in London and New York in the early twentieth century. Grainger’s ideas relating to Spanish music arguably even had an impact on his compositions, and would evolve in his writings and lectures in the 1930s.