Cecilia

Cecilia, which is the name of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, has been a consistently used name in the United States, where it has ranked among the top 500 names for girls for more than 100 years. It was the 274th most popular name for American girls born in 2007. It was the 317th most popular given name for women and girls in the United States census of 1990. It also ranked among the top 100 names for girls born in Sweden in the early years of the 21st century.

Feminine variant forms

Beatriz

Beatriz (Portuguese pronunciation: [βiɐˈtɾiʒ]) is a Spanish, Galician and Portuguese female first name. It corresponds to the Latin name Beatrix and the English and Italian name Beatrice. The name in Latin means 'brings joy' and in other languages also means 'she who brings others happiness'.

Beatriz may refer to:

Given name

María Grever

María Grever (14 September 1885 – 15 December 1951) was the first female Mexican musician to become a successful composer.

Early life

María Joaquina de la Portilla Torres was born to a Spanish father (Francisco de la Portilla) and Mexican mother (Julia Torres) in Guanajuato, Mexico. For the first six years of her life she lived in Mexico City, moving to her father's natal city, Sevilla, in 1888. She studied music in France, with Claude Debussy and Franz Lenhard among her teachers. In 1900 she moved back to Mexico and continued her musical studies at her aunt's solfège school. In 1907, the then 22-year-old de la Portilla, married Leo A. Grever, an American oil company executive, and in 1916 moved to New York City where she lived for the rest of her life.

Career

Grever wrote more than 800 songs — the majority of them boleros — and her popularity reached audiences in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She was said to have possessed perfect pitch and wrote most of her songs in one key. Her first piece of music, a Christmas carol, was composed when she was four years old. She wrote her first song when she was 18 years old, "A Una Ola" (To a Wave), and it sold three million copies.