Goyescas

"Goyescas" is a piano suite written in 1911 by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. This piano suite is usually considered Granados's crowning creation and was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, although the piano pieces have not been authoratively associated with any particular paintings.

Piano suite

The piano writing of "Goyescas" is highly ornamented and extremely difficult to master, requiring both subtle digital manipulations and great power. Some of them have a strong improvisational feel, the clearest example of this being the fifth piece, called "El Amor y La Muerte" ("Love and Death"). The fourth piece in the series ("Quejas, ñ la Maja y el Ruiseñor"—"The Maiden and the Nightingale") is the best known piece from the suite. It resembles a nocturne, but is filled with intricate figurations, inner voices and, near the end, glittering bird-like trills and quicksilver arpeggios.

This piano suite is written in two "books" and is entitled "Goyescas: los majos enamorados" ("Goyescas: The Majos in Love"). Work on it began in 1909, and by 31 August 1910, the composer was able to write that he had composed "great flights of imagination and difficulty". He completed Book II in December 1911.

Granados himself gave the première of Book I at the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona on 11 March 1911; he gave the first performance of Book II at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on 2 April 1914. "El pelele" ("The straw man"), subtitled "Escena goyesca", is usually programmed as part of the "Goyescas" suite; Granados gave the première in Terrasa on 29 March 1914.

A one-act opera, also called "Goyescas", was written in 1915 by Granados to a Spanish libretto by Fernando Periquet y Zuaznaba using melodies from the piano version. Though the opera is rarely performed, the piano suite forms part of the standard Romantic piano repertoire.