Juli Garreta, who was born in Sant Feliu de Guíxols on 12 March 1875, was the son of a musician from Vilanova i la Geltrú who had settled in the Empordà district and who combined his watchmaker's business in the town on the Rambla Vidal avenue with his role as conductor for the town's 'La Vella' cobla band. Juli Garret worked as a watchmaker, like his father, and taught himself music (in addition to receiving lessons from his father and from a modest local pianist). At the age of twenty-two he wrote his first Sardana, entitled La Pubilla. He studied all the sheet music that came his way, and alongside that he kept himself busy playing in the 'La Vella' band, providing piano accompaniments for the films shown at the local cinema, and joining in the music-centred gatherings in Can Rovira.
He thus cultivated his outstanding intuition through a completely free-ranging musical education, not associated with any particular school. His admiration for the works of Richard Strauss and Germanic post-romanticism in general is apparent in his musical language. Before being prompted by Pau Casals to compose orchestral works, Garreta's output focused mainly on music for the sardana dance, he having written over seventy sardanas: Juny, A en Pau Casals, La pedregada, Dalt les Gavarres, Llicorella, Isabel, Nydia, Mar d'argent...
Worthy of note too are his chamber-music and orchestral works, such as his piano sonata, the cello sonata (which was given its first performance by Casals) or the various works of his that were first performed by the Pau Casals Orchestra: the Suite in G (1921), Pastoral (1922), Les illes Medes (1923), and the Violin Concerto (1925), along with the various sardanas orchestrated by Garreta ' on occasions featuring traditional Catalan instruments such as the flabiol (fipple flute), tible (shawm), tenora (shawm) and the fiscorn (bugle), as in the work entitled Sardana, which is in fact an orchestral version of the third movement of his Piano Sonata. Noteworthy among his early works for orchestra are his Impressions simfòniques (1907), the Scherzo (1915) and the Preludi mediterrani (1918).
Garreta's work was the object of much comment and praise, most memorably in the comment by composer Eduard Toldrà, which clearly points to the roots of the music of this composer from Sant Feliu de Guíxols: 'Garreta sings enternally with romantic exaltation (though with the force of a man with a sound spirit), and he always sings in Catalan!' It is thus no wonder that in the concert arranged in homage to him a few months after his death (which came on 2 December 1925), Pau Casals proclaimed 'I have lost a friend. Catalonia has lost a genius'.
Jordi León