by MARCELLE MEYER
Goyescas (From Pictures by Goya)
Granados
1. Los Requiebros (Gallantries); 2. Coloquio en la Reja (Conversation at the Lattice); 3. El fandango de Candil (The Fandango by Lamp-light) ; 4. Quejas 6 la Maja y el Ruisenor (Complaints of the Serpent and the Nightingale) ; 5. El Amor y la Muerte (Love and Death) ; 6. Epilogo (Serenata del espectro) (Epilogue : The Spectre's Serenade)
Goya (Francisco Goya y Lucientes, 1746-1828), some of whose pictures Granados has here interpreted in terms of music, was the most gifted Spanish painter of his time, and for a great part of his long life the favourite painter of the Spanish court. Goya was a remarkable man, a keen observer of the life and manners of his age, and as bitter a satirist as was the English
Hogarth a couple of generations before him. He painted portraits, but always with a cynical appreciation of the truth; he satired vice and frivolity in his drawings and etchings ; yet, for what he admired, he had a sympathy as warm, a brush soft and charming, as both could be hard and bitter for what he found terrible and loathsome in human nature. The music of Granados has its affinity with the art of Goya in the manner of expression both adopted conomy of line, massing of light and shade, lucidity of pattern, spaciousness, and the suggestion of movement. Still-life and the abstract had no place in the art of either Goya or Granados ; each subscribed to Goya s expressed creed, 'A picture is finished when its effect is true'.
The best known of the whole group is the Quejas 6 la Maja y el Ruisenor, which is here translated as ' Complaints of the Serpent and the Nightingale' but sometimes as ' The Maiden and the Nightingale '. Neither title conveys the full sense ; unless, of course, the intelligent listener understands the serpent to be the maiden-which is, in fact, what he is intended to do. There is more than one picture of Goya entitled La Maja , and it is quite clear that the women depicted in the pictures are sirens of the most effective order.
Another translation which it has been difficult to concentrate in a few words is that of Coloquio en la. Reja. In
Spanish, a Reja is the name given to the metal screen or grill which is fixed to the windows, particularly those facing on the street. The idea, surely derived from the Orient, was originally to keep the women under control behind the grill, as in a harem, besides keeping marauders out. It is, however usually adapted to a very human use, that of providing a convenient, screened and reasonably safe place at which .o'vers can do their courting. This is what is shown in the picture which Granados has set to music.