Frederic Mompou Dencausse was born in Barcelona on 16 April 1893, to a Catalan lawyer father and a mother of French origin; his brother Josep became a painter, whose sketch of a simple farmhouse appeared on the covers of all of Frederic’s published music. He studied piano at the Conservatori del Liceu under Pedro Serra, then in Paris — where Fauré, whom he had heard in Barcelona at nine, headed the Conservatoire — studying with Isidor Philipp and privately with Ferdinand Motte-Lacroix. He carried a letter of introduction to Fauré from Granados that never reached its recipient. He died in Barcelona on 30 June 1987, at ninety-four.

Mompou wrote almost nothing but piano music and songs, and refined a manner he called primitivista — music without bar lines or key signatures in places, built from bell resonances and Catalan folk inflection, owing more to Satie and to silence than to any school. The Música callada cycle, after St John of the Cross, is its distillation: music whose subject is quietness itself. Pianists return to him for what almost no other twentieth-century composer offers — an idiom where touch and pedal are the entire argument — which is why five different pianists on this site have recorded him.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Mompou
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q457178