Elegia eterna (1914)

3 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

No lloréis ojuelos from Colección de canciones amatorias (c 1913)

If all Granados’s music, or a significant proportion of it, were like Elegia eterna, Catalan culture would have its answer to composers like Falla and Turina who were so powerfully attracted to the folk song of Andalusia. Elegia eterna is a song by a Catalan composer to a Catalan text by a Catalan poet. Written for the great Catalan soprano Maria Barrientos, it seems to emerge spontaneously from the heart of a tradition the composer knew his singer both shared and understood. The beauty of the vocal line derives from inflections natural to the text and, particularly in the vocalises at the end of the second and fourth stanzas, from the emotional intensity of a lament that transcends the verse that inspired it.

In fact, 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 Tonadillas collection, the Madrid background is not 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.

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. The Spanish element emerges more clearly in the last four of the collection, including No lloréis, ojuelos, with its overt guitar figurations in the piano part and its perceptibly Andalusian flavour in the vocal line.