Programme — Goyescas – Los Majos Enamorados (Majos in Love), Los Requiebros (The Greetings): Allegretto, Coloquio en la Reja (Conversation at the grille): Andantino allegretto …

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 his younger Spanish contemporaries Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Turina, both of whom were born in Andalusia. But like his fellow-Catalan Isaac Albéniz, he understood it and could write convincingly in the flamenco idiom.    He did not however, base his musical language on it. 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 fervently collected.

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 Tonadillas en un estilo antiguo, the first of his two major song collections, are a poetic evocation of the Madrid of Goya and most of the Goyescas piano pieces, written in two books between 1909 and 1912, are    inspired by scenes depicted by Goya in engravings and tapestry designs. The Goyescas opera, which sets the same scenes in a dramatic context, is based for the most part on the Goyescas piano pieces. It was the success of the Goyescas opera on its first performance at the New York Metropolitan in 1916 and a subsequent invitation to the White House that caused the composer and his wife to miss their boat to Spain and, fatally, take another, the SS Sussex – which was torpedoed by a German submarine in the English Channel.

Goyescas – Los Majos Enamorados (Majos in Love)

Book 1 (1909-11)

Los Requiebros (The Greetings): Allegretto

Coloquio en la Reja (Conversation at the grille): Andantino allegretto

El Fandango de Candil: (Fandango by candle-light): Gallardo

Quejas ó la Maja y el Ruiseńor (Lament of the maja and the nightingale): Andante melancólico

Book 2 (1911-12)

El Amor y la Muerte (Love and Death): Animato e dramatico

Epilogo – Serenata del Espectro (Epilogue – Serenade of the Ghost): Allegretto misterioso

Perhaps because    the source of their inspiration was so close to the composer’s heart,    the Goyescas piano pieces are the most liberated examples of his genius. “I have written,” he said without exaggeration, “a collection of great sweep and difficulty.” The piano scoring is abundant in technical problems but never for the sake of virtuosity itself. Its purpose, like that of the extravagant harmonies and the structural and textural risks he takes – sometimes going almost but never quite too far – is to reflect the intensity of his interest in the fate of the central figures, the majos and majas (young men and women in the old quarter of Madrid), in the amorous situations in which, prompted by Goya, he imagines they are involved.

The first of the Goyescas, Los Requiebros (The Greetings), was inspired by one of Goya’s caprichos, Tal Para Dual (Two of a Kind) an etching depicting a majo greeting his maja in a street in Madrid. Based on two tunes from the popular Tirana del Trípili by Goya’s contemporary Blas de Laserna – the first    introduced by the right hand over rolling arpeggios in the left, the second by the left hand in the middle of the keyboard under running figuration in the right – it is one of the most attractive pieces in the set. Certainly, it is irresistibly spontaneous in its development of those two themes and extraordinarily imaginative in the variety of colour, piano textures and keyboard embellishments so liberally applied to it. Although it takes the form of a jota, a dance from Goya’s native Aragon, the middle section introduces a melody from one of the composer’s own Tonadillas. Except perhaps in suggestions of the rhythmic clicking of castanets in the fluttering little triplet figures, the piano writing is not specifically Spanish in its instrumental colouring at this stage in the work. It is, however, lavishly romantic.     

There is no lack of Spanish colouring in Coloquio en la Reja – a sad exchange between the majo lover, who approaches cautiously strumming his guitar in the opening bars, and the maja object of his affection on the other side of a barred window. His expressive declarations and her replies become ever more ardent, not least in the central copla, a passionate love song which develops to a triple forte climax. The guitar-style arpeggios rising from low in the left hand reappear twice in the closing section, the second time before a sadly passionate outcry for the two hands in octaves – one of Granados’s few allusions to Andalusian canto jondo – followed by the quiet departure of the guitarist.

The third movement, El Fandango de Candil, described by the composer as a “scene to be sung and danced slowly and rhythmically”, is another reference to the music of Andalusia. A virtuoso celebration of the fandango, it sustains the dance rhythm with it prominent triplet figure almost throughout while contrasting it with expressive vocal melody in lyrical compensation for the obsessive basic rhythm.

Perhaps the best known of all Granados’s pieces is the fourth of the Goyescas. In the Goyescas opera it is allocated to a scene in which the heroine finds herself in solitary communion with the nightingale whose amorous but melancholy song so eloquently reflects her own state of mind. The 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 (from Valencia) 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 first piece in the second book of Goyescas was inspired by Goya’s haunting engraving with the same title: a majo fatally wounded in a duel is comforted as he dies by his maja. According to the composer, “All of the themes of Goyescas are united in El amor y la muerte… intense pain, nostalgic love and the final tragedy – death. The middle section is based on the themes of Quejas o la maja y el ruiseñor and Los requiebros, converting the drama into sweet gentle sorrow…the final chords represent the renunciation of happiness.” Among those chords is a pronounced dissonance signalling the moment of the death of the unfortunate majo.   

There is no precedent in Goya’s works for the Serenata del Espectro. The composer needed no outside inspiration, however, for this stylishly spectral epilogue in which the majo haunts the scenes of his amorous experiences. Granados imagines a serenade accompanied throughout by a guitar, which makes a modest entry with quietly plucked staccato articulation but which during the course of the piece extends not only its compass but also its expressive range to equal that of the piano. The difference is that, except in the most emotional episodes, it might display a dryness in touch or fantastically exaggerated guitar-style figuration. Like the preceding movement, the epilogue recalls earlier material but also introduces a new idea, a slow waltz based on a thinly disguised version of the Dies Irae. After a fortissimo climax and an equally emphatic pause for thought, the spectral guitar disappears as quietly as it had made its entry.