Goyescas (Los majos enamorados)

This is a six-movement piano suite running nearly an hour, inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya and depicting scenes from the flirtatious, volatile world of Madrid street life around 1800. The opening piece, Los requiebros (Flattery), is built on a borrowed 18th-century Spanish melody and sets a tone of rhythmic vitality and rapid ornamental runs, while the fourth piece, Quejas o La maja y el ruiseñor (Lament, or the Maja and the Nightingale), is notably slower and more lyrical, culminating in a passage where the piano imitates the song of a nightingale. Granados himself wrote instructions at key moments asking the pianist to imitate a guitar in the bass, and the sixth piece, the Epilogue, closes with a passage explicitly marking open guitar-string tuning.

What to listen for

In the fifth piece, El amor y la muerte (Love and Death), themes from all four preceding pieces return in succession, functioning as a retrospective of the whole suite before the music arrives at a passage marked molto espressivo. Then in the fourth piece, Quejas, watch for the moment after the main lyrical melody where the right hand launches into rapid, repeating-note figurations at the top of the keyboard, directly imitating a bird call before the melody returns beneath it.

Recommended recording

Alicia de Larrocha's 1989 RCA recording won both a Grammy Award and the Grand Prix du Disque, and she is frequently cited as the pianist most closely associated with this repertoire, having trained under Frank Marshall, who was himself a direct pupil of Granados.

Suggestions are AI-generated. Always verify before purchasing.