La maja dolorosa

This mini-cycle of three songs for Voice and, in this instance, Guitar, are ranked among the greatest of Granados’s musical achievements. The blend of beautiful melody, formal integrity and control in the accompaniment creates a remarkable work. The songs set the poetry of Fernando Periquet, a contemporary Spanish writer from Granados, and generally concern the theme of romantic love.

The texts are in Spanish, untranslated. Spanish composer and pianist Enrique Granados was active in the decades around the turn of the last century. Granados’s life and work were cut tragically short when the passenger ship on which he was sailing was bombed by a German U-boat in the English Channel. Heis best known for his suite for Piano Goyescas, which has been arranged for other instruments, written in 1911, around the time that these songs were written.