Juan Morel Campos
Juan Morel Campos was born in Puerto Rico in 1857. He began his musical studies at an early age with Antonio Egipciaco and later with Gonzalo Nuñez and Manuel Gregorio Távarez. He also learned to play the flute and the tuba, which qualified him to play in a military band. Morel Campos suffered a stroke in 1896 while conducting a concert in Ponce and died several days later. Morel Campos, who is considered to be a fierce advocate for the Puerto Rican dance, composed more than 550 works within this genre. Many of these, however, were not originally written for piano; rather, the composer had his own band, La Lira Ponceña, for which he composed the majority of his works. Later, he transcribed a number of these for piano. Although he based his dance pieces on many different themes, most of them have to do with women or love. His wife, Secundina Beltrán, however, always maintained that the birth of the couple’s first son “awoke the composer’s inspiration.”
Maestro Morel Campos’s Compositions
|
