‘La actividad más importante en la vida de Federico García Lorca, fuera de la literatura, fue la música’ [Apart from literature, the most important activity in the life of Federico García Lorca was music]. If we think of Lorca before the age of eighteen, however, then we could with justice invert the priorities in Federico de Onís's statement. In the years leading up to 1916 the future writer proved himself an immensely talented, if not precocious, musician. Several ancestors on his father's side had been similarly accomplished: his greatgrandfather, Antonio García Vargas, was a singer and guitarist and one of his brothers a violinist. One of the great-grandfather's four children, Federico, played the bandurria, a lute-type instrument, in the Café de Chinitas in Malaga, a location that figures as the title of one of the folksongs that Lorca arranged for voice and piano, while another, Baldomero, according to Lorca's mother, had the voice of a seraph. She also claimed that her son learnt to hum before he could speak, although he did not receive any formal musical training for sure until the family moved to Granada in 1909.2 Indeed, Lorca was not singled out for special training as a musician: his sister Concha and brother Francisco also received piano lessons from Eduardo Orense, the cathedral organist. It was with his next teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, however, that Lorca was to display his musical gifts. Segura, a timid man of nearly seventy years of age when he took Lorca under his wing, was a follower of Verdi and an unsuccessful composer: his opera The Daughters of Jepthah had been a flop. Nonetheless, he was a successful teacher and ensured that Lorca acquired an excellent piano technique and an adequate knowledge of theory and harmony. Apart from the technical aspects of performance, however, the young Lorca responded to the music he played with the same fervour and enthusiasm he was to display in later life when reciting his own poetry or delivering a lecture. According to his brother, Francisco, the earliest pieces he studied with Segura were arrangements of items from Italian opera (Francisco García Lorca, p. 424).