2 pieces from Goyescas

Quejas ó la maja y el ruiseñor

El Amor ye la muerte

As a Catalan - he was born in Lérida and spent most of his life in Barcelona - Enrique Granados was not as interested in flamenco as some of his Spanish contemporaries like Manuel de Falla or Joaquín Turina or even fellow-Catalan Isaac Albéniz. He drew still less on Catalan folk music. His spiritual home was the Madrid of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Madrid of Francisco de Goya, the artist whose work he admired and collected so fervently. “I fell in love with Goya’s psychology,” wrote Granados, “with his palette, with him, with the duchess of Alba, with his quarrels, his models, his loves and flatteries, with the pink and white cheeks against lace and black velvet, those tight-waisted bodies, hands of jasmine and mother-of-pearl resting on jet trinkets. All of these things dazzled and possessed me.”

He was so possessed by Goya, in fact, that he not only took up painting himself - in the style of Goya, of course - but also wrote music directly related to the artist’s work or the times in which he lived. The first of his two major song collections, Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo, are a poetic evocation of the Madrid of Goya, who is actually referred to in the opening song in the set. The six Goyescas piano pieces written at about the same time, between 1909 and 1911, are all inspired by scenes depicted in Goya tapestry designs in the Prado. And the Goyescas opera, which sets the same scenes in a dramatic context, is based for the most part on the piano pieces of the same name. It was the success of Goyescas on its first performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1916 and a subsequent invitation to the White House from President Wilson that caused the composer and his wife to miss their boat to Spain and, fatally, take another that was torpedoed by a German submarine.

The best known of all Granados’s pieces is the fourth of the Goyescas, Quejas o la maja y el ruiseñor (Laments or the Woman and the Nightingale). In the opera it is allocated to a scene in which the heroine, Rosario, finds herself in solitary communion with the nightingale whose amorous but melancholy song so eloquently reflects her own state of mind. Its lovely main theme, first heard in its definitive form after an introduction devoted to discreet hints of it, is one of the few examples of an actual folk song in Granados’s music. The subject of a spontaneously extended improvisation in an abundant variety of piano colours, the song is eventually answered by the nightingale that makes its unmistakable entry shortly before the end.

The next of the Goyescas piano pieces, El Amor ye la muerte (Love and Death), is the basis of the tragic closing scene of the opera. It is so dramatically orientated - with its grim opening, its sad thematic reminiscences of earlier episodes in the work (including Rosario’s folk song), its syncopated rhythmic figures in sombre minor harmonies, its death-knell ending - you could easily believe that it was written with its operatic destiny in mind.

Gerald Larner ©2005