Music and Art: Goya II

Goya: Capricho 1: Francisco Goya y Lucientes, pintor (Francisco Goya y

Lucientes, painter)

We looked earlier at the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746 1828)

and how his maja pictures influenced the 20th century Spanish
composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) to create his Goyescas.
Other engravings by Goya from his series Los Caprichos were similarly
influential on the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (18951968) to write a set of pieces for the guitar entitled 24 Caprichos de
Goya, Op. 195, completing the work in 1961. Of the 80 images in
the Los Caprichos set, Castelnuovo-Tedesco set music to 23 of them.
Los Caprichos (The Caprices) were created in 1797 and 1789 and
published in 1799. The light-hearted title, Los Caprichos (The
Caprices) is contradicted by the dark imagery. Goya used the images
to condemn contemporary Spanish society by laying bare its follies
and foolishness. He rails against superstition, the ignorance and
inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, the actions of
the clergy, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes and the
decline of rationality. Despite the seriousness of his criticism, his
informal artistic style in the pictures keeps the set from being overly
severe and foreshadows the modernist movement of a century later.
The first caprice is a portrait of the painter, shown as authoritative,
well-dressed, and debonair.

Goya: Capricho 7: Ni asi la distingue (Even so he cannot make her out)

The music is similarly self-assured, and hides a musical motto on

Goyas name. To emphasize the formal nature of the work, we are
given a 3-part fugue with a middle march-like section.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: No. 1. Francisco
Goya y Lucientes, Pintor (Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Painter) (Zoran
Duki, guitar)
The problems of society and of telling a persons position in the world
comes to the fore in the picture Ni asi la distingue (Even so he cannot
make her out) where the man in center of the picture cannot tell,
quite, what kind of woman he is talking to.

Goya: Capricho 10: El amor y la muerte (Love and death)

The uneasiness of the imagery is captured in the music through

agitated fast music.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: No. 4, Ni asi la

distingue (Even so he cannot make her out) (Zoran Duki, guitar)

The bitter end of a duel is depicted in El amor y la muerte. A girl holds
a dying man whose discarded dueling sword lies at his feet.

Goya: Capricho 37: Si sabr ms el discipulo? (Perhaps the pupil knows

better?)

In his Tempo di Tango, the music is made of two contrasting elements:

rhythmic chords (the false bravery of the duelist) and a plaintive,
descending these (the grief of the woman). You can even imagine you
can hear the duel going back and forth. The final bars represent the
dying convulsions of the mortally wounded man
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: No. 6. El amor y la
muerte (Love and death) (Zoran Duki, guitar)
Goyas sarcastic and biting commentary on education takes the form
of a teacher and a student, but it is the student who is teaching his
master the alphabet and both are donkeys.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco takes on modern music theory after a bit of

braying. He starts with a twelve-tone construction in the style of the
Second Viennese School before converting it all into a nonSchoenbergian Gavotte, then going on to write musical inversions and
retrogrades in the 12-tone style. In addition to the Gavottes,
two Musettes are added, mocking modern dissonance.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: No. 15. Si sabra
mas el discipulo? (Perhaps the pupil knows better?) (Zoran Duki,
guitar).
One of the most famous images from the series might actually be a
self-portrait of Goya. A sleeping man is surrounded by the things of
nightmares: evil owls, a lynx, and many shadowy bat-like creatures.

Goya: Capricho 43: El sueo de la razn produce monstruos (The sleep of

reason produces monsters)

The music takes this on a variation set. The theme is a short

chaconne. Variation 1 uses rapid arpeggios, Var. II is based on triplets,
and Var. III put the chaconne in the base with upper voice scales. Var.
4 gives us the chaconne melody in the treble again before the last
Var. is performed con fuoco (with fire), exploring the theme in slower
notes. The piece ends slowly and solemnly.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco: 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195: No. 18. El sueno
de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters)
(Zoran Duki, guitar)
We may not hear the monsters in the music, but the set of five
variations puts us inside the tormented mans head, as each new
variation takes the same old theme and brings it around again and
again and again.

Castelnuovo-Tedescos picture of Goyas world through the medium of

the guitar made use of an inspired choice of instrument. Each picture
is a tiny world, reflecting the things Goya found in his world, and each
guitar movement also creates a tiny world. In addition, the use of
compositional ideas from the time of Goya (theme and variations,
gavottes, and tangos) even if in a 20th-century manner, brings his
world closer to ours.

Music and Art: Goya

Enrique Granados

Francisco Goya (1746 1828) lead a life in and out of favour with the
Spanish king and his highly dramatic paintings and etchings,
particularly in relation to the various Spanish wars, were highly
influential. His pictures of woman, his maja pictures, were an
inspiration to Spanish composer Enrique Granados (1867-1916) and in
their honor, he wrote his set of piano pieces called Goyescas (In the
Manner of Goya).
What drew Granados to Goyas works was the contrast in colours. In a
1910 letter he explained I fell in love with the psychology of Goya
and his palette that rosy-whiteness of the cheeks contrasted with
lace and jet-black velvet, those jasmine-white hands, the colour of
mother-of-pearl have dazzled me
Granados was one of the most important Spanish composers of the
Romantic era, and in Goyescas, he created one of the great works of
Romantic piano music. Its harmonies have been described as jeweltoned and one critic said that the music gave performer and
audiences alike the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers
through masses of richly-coloured jewels.

Goya: Capricho No. 5. Tal para cual

Goyescas was written as two collections plus one additional piece but
now form a united seven of 6 pieces. Not all of Goyescas can be
directly linked with works by Goya by title, but some parallels can be
made.
No. 1. Los requiebros (Flattery), was inspired by Goyas Capricho, Tal
para cual, and is based on the dance form called the ajota. The work
is a set of variations based on an 18th-century piece by Bas de
Lasema, Tirana del Tripoli.
No. 1. Los requiebros (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)

Granados: Coloquio en la reja

No. 2. Coloquio en la reja Do de amor(Dialogue at the window

love duet) captures the mood inherent in the picture of the hidden
woman in the house speaking with her suitor through the grill that
separates them. The picture, however, is not by Goya, but by
Granados himself, in a very Goya-esque style.

No. 2. Coloquio en la reja, duo de amor (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)

No. 3 El fandango de candil (Candlelit fandango) is clearly a night
piece. It is full of rhythm and shadow, and was described by the
composer as a scene to be sung and danced slowly and rhythmically.
No. 3. El fandango de candil (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)
No. 4. Quejas, o la maja y el ruiseor (Laments or the Maja and the
nightingale) is based on a folk-song from Valencia, and Granados
takes the melody through a set of variations, each one more
decorated than the previous, until he concludes in
a cadenza imitating the nightingale.

Goya: Capricho 10: El amor y la muerte (Love and death)

No. 4. Quejas, o La maja y el ruisenor (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)

No.5. El amor y la muerte Balada (Love and death ballade), is
considered Granadoss greatest individual composition. The title
comes from GoyasCaprichos, and according to Granados: 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 ruiseor and Los
requiebros, converting the drama into sweet gentle sorrowthe final
chords represent the renunciation of happiness.
No. 5. El amor y la muerte (Love and Death) (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)
No. 6. Eplogo: Serenata del espectro (Epilogue The ghosts
serenade) uses the Dies Irae, the Roman Catholic chant for the dead.
At the conclusion the score indicates that the ghost disappears
plucking the strings of his guitar. There are no Goya paintings of
ghosts and guitars, but ghostly imagery was evident in many of
Goyas end-of-life black paintings he did for his house called Quinta
del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man), where, in recovering from a
serious illness, he lost his hearing.

Goya: El pelele

No. 6. Epilogo: Serenata del espectro (Epilogue: The Ghosts Serenade)

(Alicia de Larrocha, piano)
No. 7. El pelele Escena goyesca (The straw man scene from
Goya), comes from Goyas painting of the same name. The paining
depicts a group of women, his majas, holding the corners of a blanket
and tossing a straw man in the air.
El pelele, goyesca (Alicia de Larrocha, piano)
Six of the seven parts of Goyescas (No. 6 was excluded) were used as
the inspiration for his opera Goyescas, which received its debut at the
Metropolitan Opera on 28 January 1916. On his way back to Spain, his
ferry boat from England to Dieppe was torpedoed by a German U-boat
and Granados drowned trying to save his wife. The manuscript of the
opera went down with the boat.