Colección de canciones amatorias (c 1913)

Descúbrase el pensamiento

Mañanica era

Llorad, corazón

Mira que soy niña

No lloréis, ojuelos

Iban al pinar

Gracia mía

As a Catalan - he was born in Lérida (or Lleida) and spent most of his life in Barcelona - Enrique (or Enric) 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 didn’t draw much on Catalan folk music either. 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 and the first of his two major song collections, Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo.

There is something of an “antique style” in Granados’s other song collection, the Canciones amatorias, which also relate to a Spain of the past, though not to Goya’s time but to the Golden Age two hundred years earlier. They are far from being pastiches of Renaissance music and yet, at least to begin with, they have a purity in line and texture in keeping with the period in which the (mainly anonymous) texts were written. While the modulations and metrical contradictions of Descúbrase el pensamiento are clearly of their time, the sustained contrapuntal relationship between voice and piano secures a classical intimacy in expression. The Spanish origin of the song is scarcely perceptible except in the occasional cadence and in the two passages of lamenting vocalise. There is even less that is obviously Spanish in Mañanica era, which owes its freshness to a similar kind of texture as that of Descúbrase, and Llorad, corazón with its engaging piano ritornello and its rueful vocal line set against another chaste counterpoint in the accompaniment.

The Spanish element emerges more clearly in the last four of the Canciones amatorias, the piano adopting guitar figurations fairly discreetly in Mira que soy niña and then quite overtly in No lloréis, ojuelos, which has a perceptibly Andalusian flavour in its vocal line. The charming Iban al pinar, with its left-hand drone accompaniment and its modal melody, clearly derives from a folk source but from somewhere nearer Madrid, perhaps from the pine groves of Cuenca where the scene is set. Gracia mía, which is sustained by Spanish rhythmic exuberance except where it is briefly but effectively offset by the reflective fourth stanza, is the most brilliant inspiration in the collection.