Granados - Goyescas review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 80

Herrera/Peña/Curtis/López/BBCSO and Singers/Pons
(Harmonia Mundi)
Based on paintings by Goya, Enrique Granados’s lost opera is full of melodic invention, energetically performed here

A set of piano pieces is an unlikely starting point for a stage work, but that is exactly how Goyescas, Enrique Granados’s only opera, was conceived. In 1914, Granados completed a piano suite of the same name, subtitled Los Majos Enamorados (The Majos in Love), which was inspired by Goya’s early paintings of life among the working classes of Madrid. After its success, the composer was encouraged to use the music of the suite as the raw material for an opera, with a libretto set among those characters immortalised by Goya. The Paris Opéra commissioned Goyescas, but because of the outbreak of the first world war, the first performance eventually took place at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1916. It was while Granados and his wife were returning from the premiere that the ship on which they were travelling was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the English Channel, and both were drowned.