La Maya de Goya
Enrique Granados
About the piece...
This is an arrangement for solo-guitar of Granados' Tonadilla La Maya de Goya.
Enrique Granados (1867 - 1916) was a Spanish composer and pianist. He mainly wote piano and vocal music, so the guitar pieces are transcriptions. He studied under amongst others Emilio Pujol and Felipe Pedrell and founded the Barcelona Conservatory in 1901. In contrast with the other Spanish composers of his generation, he had little interest in the culture of his native district. He felt attracted, however, to the Castilian Tonadilla and the Spanish art from the classical and early romantic period. His love for the paintings of the classical Spanish painter Goya is legendary and shows in many pieces he composed with Goya's paintings in mind.
He met his death in a sad way. In march 1916, near Dieppe on the English Channel a German submarine torpedoed his ship on which he returned to Europe after a concert tour in the USA. He drowned miserably.
This Tonadilla originates from a set of pieces for voice and piano, dedicated to the "Maya" paintings by the classical Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.
What Granados bore in mind exactly, remains a question: the painting La Maya de Goya exists in two versions, La Maya Vestida (the dressed girl) en La Maya Desnuda (the naked girl).
My own feelings about the piece..
What's your feeling about the piece? is a question which occurs many times in my guitar lessons lately. Up till now, I used to avoid the answer, I just played what I liked and that's it. It is an important question, though, because it determines your motivation in playing it. Why does a piece attract you? The form? The sound? The eloquence? An accidental story of which the piece forms the anacrusis or accompaniment? An impression or a unspoken memory?
At the moment, this piece represents my personal guitaristic midlife-crisis. Surprised? Well, I'll dwell a bit on this subject.
Recently, I bought a new guitar, on which I still am not completely at home. This is just plain logic, even though it surprised me how natural I had become after twelve years on the Contreras Estudio, my old and faithful guitar. The new guitar -a Bernabe M10 with Spruce top- is quite critical concerning old habits: she tolerates only little inaccuracy concerning aspects, the Contreras was much more tolerant about. There is considerable yield for the effort to aim right on spot, however: a beatiful tone which beats the Contreras.
As a consequence, the old material feels almost a little uncomfortable, I cannot play it as smoothly as I used to. In fact I will have to study every piece again. I can accept this with the more complex pieces, with more easy pieces, however, it feels like a defeat that they do not sound as well as they used to. This both affects temper and the fun of playing.
The only solution appears to be patience: patience for conscious study and improvement, using the positive experiences of long years of playing after I played the piece for the first time.
Recently I started an additional project which I had been postponing for years: Playing by Heart.
I think this is a very good expression in English which touches the heart of the matter. The term implies a contact with the emotion of the music. In Dutch, we do not have an expression for this, we call it (literally translated) "Playing from your head", which has a far more rationalistic tone, I guess.
Playing the guitar, I am a fervid score reader. I used to play through volumes of scores, both at home and on stage. I found it quite an achievement after a poor D-grade on A Prima Vista (score reading) on my A-examination on the School of Music.
My guitar teacher sometimes sighs, that my score reading is far too good, so I won't make the effort of playing by heart. He has a good point: reading takes energy which you cannot use for the musical interpretation. The route of the information from paper to eyes and -via the brains- to the muscles which operate your fingers is -using computer terminology- a proces which consumes a lot of CPU time. As an experiment, just try to be be aware of the number of head movements required to view the score and the finger board if there are awkward movements to be executed which need close observation, away from the score. It takes considerable effort to keep reading and playing in alignment.
During my guitar history, I played few pieces by heart. When starting to play, I just had to, because I could not read scores. I learned the music note by note and did not need any score in the end. Later I started to play some more complex pieces by heart, but the principle remained the same, endless repetition caused "grounding-in" of the music. It was no conscious process.
I got to know the advantages and perils of playing by heart as a member of the Granados Duo, the guitar duo I participated in before Hans and I founded DOS Amigos.
On the one hand there was this delightful freedom to play the music, to have ample opportunity to communicate with your guitar partner and to pay attention to the actual interpretation of the music. On the other hand there was the fear for a black-out on stage without the means to retrace and recover. Black-outs did happen, much to the delight of specific critics who wanted to add some extra to their reviews. At a certain moment the music stand with score became a symbol of security against a letdown.
Although the stand with paper offers some quasi-security on stage, it is between you and the direction you are playing the music in. Worst case it blocks your musical interpretation towards the people you want to share the music with, beit "officially" on stage or in a more casual setting. They just cannot face the music!
This thought incited me in the end to give it a try to learn playing by heart in a conscious way. At times, it turned out to be another midlife-crisis experience. Because of my fast reading, I can play the old well-known repertoire much faster from paper than taking the effort and extra step to play it by heart. One gets a certain itch for efficiency with at most up to one hour playing time per day.
This piece La Maya de Goya combines for me the aspects I wrote about.
The piece has some technical challenge and requires an efficient approach. It is a puzzle to find out how to interpret the music, I do not know the text of the song (which would clarify the subject and thus give a clue) and how the Maya shows from it. You have to make a choice anyway, will it be the Vestida or the Desnuda?
Additionally, I want to play this piece by heart.
Some work to do, I guess. Line by line I am progressing towards the final chord. I do achieve some success! Some sections show the breath and freedom of musical interpretation and in this way paint the image of the elegant and somewhat buxom woman, Goya would give his life for in the eighteenth century!