Gregorio Martinez Sierra

Gregorio Martínez Sierra , 1881-1947, Spanish dramatist, novelist, and poet. His masterpiece is Canción de cuna (1911, tr. The Cradle Song, 1917), but he is also known for his tale El amor brujo, which is the subject of a ballet set to music by Manuel de Falla. In addition to many plays, he wrote novels, the most popular of which is Tu eres la paz (1907, tr. Ana María, 1921). Flores de escarcha [flowers of frost] (1900) is a collection of verse. He also translated Shakespeare and Maeterlinck, founded several literary magazines, and was active in the theater. In much of his work he collaborated with his wife, the poet María Lejárraga.

Martínez Sierra, Gregorio (1881–1948), Spanish dramatist, whose works are more notable for delicacy and quiet humour than for action or excitement, and have lately been neglected. He was much influenced by Benavente, and by Maeterlinck, whose plays he translated into Spanish. He was himself fortunate to find sympathetic translators in Harley and Helen Granville-Barker, whose version of Sierra's best known play Canción da cuna (1910), as The Cradle Song, was seen in New York in 1921, and in London in 1926 in a double bill with The Lover (El enamorado, 1913). El reino de Dios (1916), which as The Kingdom of God was seen in London in 1927, is best remembered as the play with which Ethel Barrymore, in a fine and moving performance, opened in 1928 the theatre in New York named after her. More important than his plays was Sierra's work as a director in charge of the Teatro Eslava from 1917 to 1925, when he introduced to Madrid audiences the new techniques imported into the peninsula by the Catalan Adriá Gual. He also staged for the first time many contemporary plays in translation, and new or little known Spanish works, including the first of García Lorca's plays La maleficio de la mariposa (The Butterfly's Curse, 1920).