Francisco Camprodón

Francisco Camprodón y Safont (4 March 1816 – 16 August 1870) was a Spanish playwright, poet, politician and librettist, originally from Catalonia.

Biography Provenance and early years Francisco Camprodón was born in Vic (that time known as Vich), a regional centre and manufacturing town with a focus on textiles, in the hill country roughly 100 kilometres to the north of Barcelona. He enrolled to study Jurisprudence at the University of Cervera, where he was a student near contemporary of the philosopher-theologian Jaime Balmes: the two became close life-long friends. There are suggestions that Camprodón may have contributed to one or some of the early published works of Balmes. Spain did not recover quickly from the "Great War" in which the armies of France and England had competed for control of the peninsular. The University of Cervera was the local university but it had become increasingly run down. During the 1830s it was progressively closed: Camprodón transferred to the University of Alcalá (just outside Madrid) to pursue his law studies before returning to Catalonia to conclude them, receiving his law degree in 1838 from the University of Barcelona.

Stage dramatist Having received his law degree and survived serious illness, Camprodón had two career vocations: politics and literature. A consistent timeline is hard to infer from the various sources, but the drama probably had its premiere at Madrid's Teatro Español during February 1851. It is a mark of Camprodón's commercial acumen and, perhaps, of the play's popularity that he broke with what was then the tradition by refusing to surrender future productions rights for the play to the theatre. From approximately 1854 Francisco Camprodón based himself in Madrid. A second stage work, "Espinas de una flor" ("Thorns of a flower") was premiered at the "Teatro del Drama" in 1852, followed by others as the decade progressed.

Parliament The move to Madrid coincided with a return to political engagement. Camprodón emerged as a prominent member of the Liberal Union ("Unión Liberal"), a centrist monarchist political grouping which was assuming features of a modern political party and which, from 1858, was backed by a majority in the Spanish parliament ("Cortes Generales") for a decade. Camprodón became one of the Liberal Union deputies, representing Barcelona and Santa Coloma de Farners, in 1854. He remained a member for five years, and attended party congresses over a period of ten years between 1856 and 1865. He would be remembered as a relatively independently minded party member. Overall, however, his impact on Madrid during the 1850s was more as a fashionably romanticist playwright and poet than as a politician. Probably the most successful of them all was "Marina", with music by Emilio Arrieta, which had its premiere at the Teatro del Circo in Madrid in 1855. (After Camprodón's death the libretto was updated, and "Marina" was reconfigured as an opera.

Final years During his final years, as the "Renaixença" (Catalan revival) gathered momentum, he wrote several stage plays in Catalan, such as "La teta gallinaire" (1865, "Aunt Hen") and "La tornada d'en Titó" (1867, "The Uncle returns"). After the triumph of the Glorious Revolution in 1868 he accepted a senior administrative job in Cuban, and made his way to the territory. In Cuba he contributed several articles in the newly launched Catalan language magazine, La Gresca. La Gresca was published in Havana. It was in Havana that Francisco Camprodón died on 15 August 1870.