José Echegaray

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre was born in Madrid in 1832 and spent his childhood in Murcia, where the local institute awakened a lifelong passion for mathematics; as a boy he read Goethe and Homer alongside Gauss and Lagrange. Returning to Madrid at fourteen, he graduated first in his class from the School of Civil Engineering, where he went on to teach for more than a decade while publishing work on geometry and modern physics. A champion of free trade, he entered government after the revolution of 1868 and held several ministries, including public works and finance, until the Bourbon restoration of 1874 ended his political career.

The theatre had always been his first love, and from 1874 he devoted himself to it with remarkable fertility. His plays revived the moral dilemmas of the Spanish Golden Age, conflicts of honour, conscience and duty, in the heightened idiom of nineteenth-century melodrama. In Madman or Saint (1877) a man’s refusal to live by a lie is taken for insanity; The Great Galeoto (1881), his best-known work, shows idle gossip manufacturing the very betrayal it imagines, and was twice adapted for the screen. He continued to write for the stage into the new century, with Mariana (1892) and El loco Dios (1900).

In 1904 he shared the Nobel Prize with the Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, becoming the first Spaniard to receive it. Modern taste has found his rhetoric overwrought, and his reputation has receded since. Echegaray himself never stopped working: in old age he returned to science, producing some two dozen volumes of mathematical physics, and he died in Madrid in September 1916. A street in the city’s literary quarter bears his name.