Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor from Goyescas 

Spain has always held a special place in the imagination of other Europeans; so close, yet seemingly so exotic, colorful, and enticing. Around the turn of the 20th century, French and Russian composers wrote some of the world’s most famous “Spanish” music. At the same time, several Spanish composers, each drawing much from the stylistic and aesthetic innovations of their French contemporaries Debussy and Ravel, worked to establish a distinctive Spanish style.

The works of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya inspired Goyescas, one of the most well-known compositions by Isaac Granados. Only two of its six movements have been tied to specific Goya paintings, but all evoke the atmosphere of early 19th-century Spain and, especially, the romanticized world of the majos and majas, men and women of the Spanish lower classes. The melancholic fourth movement of the work, Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Complaint, or the Maiden and the Nightingale), vividly portrays a young woman’s grief, answered finally, and indifferently, by the trills and arpeggios of the nightingale’s song. The English critic Ernest Newman once wrote that this hauntingly beautiful piece gives one “the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly colored jewels.”