Until studying with Pedrell, Albéniz was working mostly as a pianist and his compositions lacked direction. Granados had an elegant compositional style but was following the 19th century German school. In 1884, at the age of 20, Granados went to Madrid to study and through the influence of Pedrell sought to include more folkloric elements in his music.
It was not until the late nineteenth century that Paris regained its old status of being the intellectual and artistic centre of Europe. The young composers of Spain were among those lured to it. They travelled to Paris to study and took with them not only the folkloric music of Spain but also flamenco music.
French music was often more concerned with colouristic expression and offered more flexibility of phrase structure for the Spanish composers who were then able to easily combine their own ideas with that of the French school.
In 1907 Falla went to Paris to spend seven weeks there and remained for seven years. It was perhaps Falla who best managed to capture the powerful elements of flamenco and combine it with the European music tradition in large scale forms without any compromise or lapses into pastiche. Falla believed that: You must really go deep so as not to make a caricature....You must go to the natural, living sources, study the sounds, the rhythms, use their essence, not their externals. It was exactly these attitudes and approaches that were handed down to Turina, José and in turn, Rodrigo.
Untimely deaths seem to have taken some of Spains finest composers this century. Granados travelled to the United States in 1916 for the world premier of Goyescas. He remained there an extra week after receiving an invitation to play for President Wilson at the White House. On the return journey, he was aboard the Sussex sailing from Folkstone to Dieppe when it was destroyed by German torpedoes. Antonio José (1901-1936) was at a much earlier stage in his very promising career when he was executed by a firing squad at the start of the Spanish Civil War.