Goyescas

libretto by Fernando Periquet

(performed in the Tritó edition with revised orchestration by Albert Guinovert)

Tableau I

Scene 1: El Pelele (The Straw Figure)

Scene 2: La Calesa (The Dog Cart)

Scene 3: Los Requiebros (The Compliments)

Intermezzo

Tableau II

Scene 1: El Baile de Candil (The Lantern-lit Ball)

Scene 2: El Baile de Candil continued and Final del Fandango

Interludio

Tableau III

Scene 1: La Maja y el Ruiseñor (The Maja and the Nightingale)

Scene 2: Duo de amor en la reja (Love-Duet at the Window)

Scene 3: El Amor y la Muerte (Love and Death)

Many operas have provided material for piano pieces of one kind or another. Few piano works, if any apart from Goyescas, have provided material for the larger part of an opera. It wasn’t the composer’s idea to make an opera out of Goyescas - the original suggestion came from the American pianist Ernest Schelling - but it made seductive sense. As an obsessive admirer of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, whose tapestry cartoons and etchings had inspired the six pieces written for the two Goyescas piano suites between 1909 and 1911, Granados now had the opportunity to present those scenes from late eighteenth-century Madrid in a dramatic context and bring them to life on the stage.

The project was not easily accomplished, however. If it was not too difficult to arrange the piano pieces in a viable narrative order and to devise a scenario round them, the problem of fitting new words to old music involved the composer and his librettist in much painstaking labour. “With absolute modesty,” Periquet recalled, “I limited myself to the previously written piano music and patiently adjusted my dramatic plot to it in a thankless and urgent mechanical task.” Even so, it is naive to claim, just because of its pianistic associations, that the music is inimical to the voice and therefore inappropriate to opera. Granados was too good a composer and, in his late forties, too experienced to make a mistake like that. The facts are that little more than half of the opera is based on straightforward transcriptions of the piano pieces, that some of the episodes have vocal origins anyway, and that much of the material is new.

The opening scene is a characteristic example. It is true that it comes from a piano piece - El Pelele, a solitary Goyesca written a couple of years after the Goyescas suites - but the keyboard material is entrusted largely to the orchestra while the newly written and fairly elaborate choral part is superimposed on it. Although Paquiro’s solo “Aroma dais al aire” corresponds to the middle section of El Pelele, the vocal line is not the same as the melodic line of the piano original and is presented as a counterpoint to it. The next scene, La Calesa, derives not from a piano piece but from one of Granados’s early stage works, Ovillejos, a zarzuela set like Goyescas in the time of Goya. It is not until the third scene that Granados actually turns to one of the movements from the Goyescas piano suites, Los Requiebros. But as that piece is based on the popular song “El Trípili” its material is fundamentally vocal.

All but one of the remaining scenes of the opera derive from movements in the Goyescas piano suites. The exception is the second scene of the second tableau: after a first scene that follows El Fandango de Candil quite closely, making the most of the sensual line of the theme introduced here by the tenors of the chorus, Granados develops his material quite differently (and with increasing textural complexity) for the dramatic events associated with the confrontation between Fernando and Paquiro. When the fandango resumes he adds a new dance episode with castanets, simulated guitars and an atmospheric vocal solo (taken on this occasion by Pepa).

In whichever form it is presented, as a piano piece or as an operatic scena, La Maja y el Ruiseñor is Granados’s most popular inspiration. Here, at the beginning of the last tableau, it is an exquisite moment of dreamy reflection before the passionate and ultimately tragic events that follow. It is as effective for the voice, given its melodic line of folk-song origins, as it is for the virtuoso woodwind representatives of the nightingale.

Conceived as a duet, though in keyboard terms, Coloquio en la reja (as it is called in the piano suite) lends itself to Rosario and Fernando’s ecstatic Duo de amor en la reja with surprisingly little adaptation. Even the sinister pizzicato passages where, in the opera, Paquiro signals silent reminders to Fernando are in the piano original. As for the closing scene, the corresponding piano piece, El Amor y la Muerte, is so dramatically orientated - with its grim opening, its sad thematic reminiscences of earlier episodes in the work, its syncopated rhythmic figures in sombre minor harmonies inviting a dying hero’s last words, its death-knell ending - you could easily believe that it was written with its operatic destiny in mind.

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). It is not true, however, as Catalan musicology would have us believe, that Goyescas “achieves an unquestionably Spanish flavour without slipping into Andalusian or Aragonese motifs.” The second scene, La Calesa, is clearly based on the Aragonese jota and the melodic material of the next scene, Los Requiebros, is associated above all with Andalusia. And when he came to write new material for the opera Granados does seem to have looked to Andalusia for inspiration, as in the idiomatic additions to the fandango in El Baile de Candil.

Of the two purely orchestral pieces, the Intermezzo and the Interludio, the former certainly has an Andalusian feel to it. Written in a couple of days - to replace a shorter piece published in the Schirmer edition of the opera before the first performance at the New York Met in January 1916 - it begins with a characteristically heroic flamenco gesture which is even more impressive when recalled with horn and trumpet colours later on.

It is to Catalan musicology, however, that we owe the version of Goyescas to be performed tonight. Granados confessed that he was unhappy with the orchestration - which was by no means all his own work - and it is thought that, but for his untimely death in the English Channel, he would have rewritten it for a smaller ensemble. Albert Guinovart has successfully completed that task in a score published by Tritó in association with Lérida University in 1997. His edition includes an extension of La maja y el ruiseñor, to accommodate the nightingale cadenza at the end of the piano version, the composer’s original thoughts on the dramatic transition between the two last scenes of the third tableau and, of course, the highly melodious replacement Intermezzo in what is believed to be Granados’s own luminous scoring.

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