7 songs from Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo (1910–11)

La maja dolorosa I: ¡Oh, muerte cruel!

La maja dolorosa II: ¡Ay, majo de mi vida!

La maja dolorosa III: De acquel majo amante

Callejo

El tra -la -la y el punteado

El majo timido

El majo discreto

Although he was born in Lérida (or Lleida) and spent most of his life in Barcelona, Enrique (or Enric) Granados drew no more on Catalan folk music than on flamenco. 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. Goya was the source of inspiration of his Goyescas piano pieces, his opera of the same name based on the same material, and the first of his two major song collections, Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo.

The titles of many of the songs in the Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo (Little songs in the antique style) draw attention to their association with Goya, whose most famous paintings, like Majas en balcón (Girls on a balcony), La Maja vestida (The clothed girl) and La Maja desnuda (The nude girl) are called to mind by, say, La Maja dolorosa or, most directly, La Maja de Goya. The majas and majos of these songs – to Castilian texts by the composer’s journalist friend Fernando Periquet, who was to write the Goyescas libretto – inhabit the same working-class streets in Madrid and cherish the same erotic preoccupations as those in Goya’s paintings. In the three Maja dolorosa songs, a mini-cycle within the Tonadillas collection, in spite of a hint of guitar figuration in the second the Madrid background is not clearly apparent until the last of them. The maja feels the loss of her majo too intensely in the first two to see beyond her immediate grief but in De acquel majo amante, as she remembers her late lover in his Madrid setting, the dance rhythms that were all but submerged in ¡Ay, majo de mi vida! rise discreetly to a distinctly brighter surface.

The remaining four tonadillas are short and cheerful reflections of the spirited character of the maja who sings them. There is little room for doubt in Callejo that she will catch up with her errant lover or, in El tra -la -la y el punteado, that she will continue to strum her taunting guitar for as long as her strategy requires. The shy suitor in El majo timido will be duly encouraged but, while he might be better looking than the lover celebrated in Il majo discreto, will he be so trustworthy?