The
work of Granados as both composer and concert pianist was
cut short in 1916. He and his wife had crossed the Atlantic
from America to Britain and missed their berths on a ship
that would have taken them directly to Spain. This because
of a recital at the White House, given at the special request
of President Woodrow Wilson. In any event he and his wife
took ship for Dieppe on the Sussex and that ship was
torpedoed by a German submarine in the Channel. Granados
initially clambered aboard a life-raft, but seeing his wife
still struggling in the sea he dived in to try to save her
and both were drowned. Purely in terms of music the loss
was considerable. The work that Granados wrote in the years
immediately preceding the war had a new maturity and gave
promise of much more fine work.
The
six pieces which make up the suite Goyescas are quintessential
Granados. They have his slightly aristocratic air of distance,
for all the rhetoric of romantic emotion. This is due in
part to the composer’s own personality. As for the rest they
are musical evocations of works of art, images by Goya, so
that they are twice removed, as it were, from the flesh and
blood of their subjects. I don’t say this with any intention
to criticise negatively, merely to establish the character
of the music. There is, by design, a retrospective cast to
these pieces, as to much of his music. ‘His’ Spain was not
so much the one he actually lived in, but the vanished Madrid
of Goya, of the majos and majas, the stylish
and handsome denizens of the artistic world of Madrid in
the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Granados had a great love of Goya’s work – though, interestingly,
he shows no sign of responding to the crueller, more bitter
side of that great artist’s representation of the Madrid
of his time. So much did he love Goya’s work that Granados
even made some drawings in the style of the great master,
some of which are reproduced in José Subira’s Enrique
Granados, published in Madrid in 1926.
So
far as I am aware, Granados never wrote for the guitar. Discussing
the Goyescas soon after their publication, Ernest
Newman wrote in The Musical Times in 1917 that “above
all the music is a gorgeous treat for the fingers, as all
music that is the perfection of writing for its particular
instrument is. It is difficult, but so beautifully laid out
that it is always playable: one has the voluptuous sense
of passing the figures through masses of richly coloured
jewels … It is pianoforte music of the purest kind.” That
sounds like a pretty good argument against any attempt to
transcribe it for any other instrument(s). But it is worth
noting that Granados’s score more than once – for example
in the Coloquio en la reja (Lovers’ Dialogue at the
Window) – requests that the player imitates the sound of
the guitar. And several of the pieces make use of older materials,
such as Blas de Laserna’s ‘Tirana del Trípili’ in Los
requiebros (Flattery) which were often played on the
guitar, or explore genres associated with the guitar, such
as the fandango in El fandango de candil (Fandango
by Candlelight) or the serenade in Epílogo: Serenata del
espectro (Epilogue: The Spectre’s Serenade).
Without
rehearsing either the larger arguments for and against transcription,
or the issues raised by this particular transcription, let
it suffice to say that the outcome is delightful and that
much of the resultant music is quite lovely. The piano original
holds Granados’s indebtedness to the classical keyboard tradition
in a delicate balance with his borrowings from the specifically
Spanish traditions. This arrangement tips the balance very
much in favour of the Spanish sound-world. In one sense,
of course, that is a loss and involves a certain simplification
of the original’s complex nature and effect. One wouldn’t,
certainly, want to know the Goyescas only through
this transcription for three guitars; but for those familiar
with the keyboard original – perhaps in Alicia de Larrocha’s
classic recording, recently re-released on EMI Classics (3615142),
or Douglas Riva’s very acceptable version on Naxos (8.554403) – will
surely appreciate the fresh perspective offered in Christophe
Dejour’s excellent transcription. The playing is exemplary
and the recorded sound is eminently clear.
Naxos
cannot be accused of neglecting the piano music of Granados,
given the several volumes of the survey of his keyboard works
played by Douglas Riva which they have already issued (see
below). Here they pay another tribute to Granados, one which
throws a
refreshing, clarifying new light upon his finest work for
piano.
Glyn Pursglove
Reviews of some of the Granados Naxos
piano recordings
Trio Campanella:
Christophe Dejour, Frank Massa, Thomas Winthereik (guitars) 
for
details
