24 Caprichos de Goya

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's (1895-1968) monumental Goya cycle represents the longest single composition for classical guitar. It is unmatched in its stupendous combination of length, high standards, and degree of difficulty.Castelnuovo-Tedesco committed his op. 195 to paper in 1961 after a rather long period of preparation. At the time of his composition of this work dedicated to his son Lorenzo, he could look back on more than thirty years of experience in the field of guitar composition. He himself, however, was never a guitarist.

The Italian Castelnuovo-Tedesco, by then a resident of Hollywood, was one of the first composers whom Andrés Segovia was able to win over to the idea of creating a modern, serious repertoire for the guitar. At the end of his life he brought his many contributions to this field to a splendid climax.Castelnuovo-Tedesco's collaboration with Segovia had brought its share of disappointments and limitations, but this was now all a thing of the past. The contributions of this knowledgeable and sophisticated orchestral and vocal composer to the guitar repertoire acquired their own independent status and expressed his noblest artistic inspirations.

One reason for his interest in composing guitar music on the grand musical and philosophical scale may have had to do with the general musical trends of his times. His cantabile, neoromantic style did not meet with much resonance at the height of the atonal avant-garde, but the guitar was gaining increasing acceptance as a concert instrument. As such, it created a demand for a quality repertoire of traditional orientation.Moreover, Spain figured importantly in his life and work. His ancestors, Jewish Sephardim, had immigrated to Italy from Spain in the fifteenth century. His reflection on his Spanish roots manifested itself again and again the fine feeling in his settings of Spanish poetry and in the form of stylistic reminiscences of characteristically Spanish rhythms and melodies.His choice of the Caprichos of Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) as the extramusical source for his opus magnum also had to do with his personal identification with the painter and with the expressive content of his art. There is much to suggest that the Caprichos represent a personal statement on Castelnuovo-Tedesco's part, a personal statement combining the bitterness of old age, retrospection, and the wisdom of old age.Castelnuovo-Tedesco chose twenty-four of Goya's eighty Caprichos for his music. A thorough examination of the works selected and Castelnuovo-Tedesco's musical references to them would require a book-length study. Here it must suffice to say that these references are both brilliant and profound.

As far as Goya is concerned, it is abundantly clear that the Caprichos also occupy a special place within his overall oeuvre. In their bitterly satirical allusions they offer a scathingly critical look at Spanish society at the end of the eighteenth century, exposing its profound state of corruption from the point of view of the emerging spirit of the Enlightenment. Goya's ironic subtitles and commentaries help somewhat in the interpretation of his art but do not clear up all its many implications. The reproductions of the Caprichos here allow them to speak for themselves along with the music and enable you the listener to engage in your own free associations or explorations of their meaning.It was the composer himself who designed his op. 195 in four sets of six numbers each. He was thinking of how it could be recorded on two long-playing records with A and B sides. Each set begins with a fast and furious piece and concludes with a moderated piece of serious character and on a larger scale.

Almost all the pieces draw more or less directly on historical dance forms related to one of Goya's Caprichos.Nos. 1 and 24 refer to pictorial sources not directly related to the series of Caprichos. Both contain a fugato section. The opening motif of No. 1 returns at the conclusion of No. 24, thus underscoring the cyclical unity and symmetry of the overall design.The simultaneous act of listening to the music and looking at its pictorial sources may cause some initial irritation owing to Castelnuovo-Tedesco's musical idiom, especially in view of the times in which he lived: his language is almost diametrically opposed to the bitter malice and shrillness of the grimacing, horribly ugly visual universe revealed by Goya in his Caprichos. The music does not aim at an analogous setting but employs its own independent idiom in its associative exploration of the various levels of meaning in that visual universe. The composer considers the content of the paintings, takes inspiration from them, maintains a deep inner connection to them in his music, and yet creates room for his own personal treatment of their subject matter.No. 15, "Si sabrá más el discípulo?", may be cited as a characteristic example. Here Castelnuovo-Tedesco has a twelve-tone row of grotesque articulation and slight stupidity. He repeats it and sets it in retrograde, mirror, and mirror retrograde as if to drive us all crazy and in the form of a clumsy gavotte or a rustic musette. It is thus that he, in his own way, mirrors Goya's art and pokes fun at twelve-tone technique.Thanks to his experience in guitar composition and knowledge of the effects specific to that instrument, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was very much aware of how one should go about expressing a musical idea in the guitar's tonal range and with its not all that easy-to-grasp playing technique.Be this as it may, his Caprichos de Goya also clearly reflect his experience as an orchestral composer. His overwhelming stores of ideas, the dense texture of his counterpoint, and the extremeness and excessiveness required to meet the challenge of Goya's art mean that the guitarist finds himself faced with one supreme challenge after another. No one of the Caprichos can be played as it is without certain modifications or daring technical solutions.

I am very grateful that the original text has been published without changes. As in my version of Antonio José's sonata (MDG L 3407), I was able to pass over the editor's distortions of musical meaning and much simpler version and to present a version corresponding as closely as possible to the original.

I began my study of this work three years ago. The recording sessions were concluded in 1995, during the centennial of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's birth, and the recording itself is now being released during the bicentennial of Goya's birth. This music introduced me to a new dimension of guitar playing that had a strangely relativizing effect on all that I knew. The clean craftsmanship and artistic honesty of the music have more than made up for all the effort it required.

Frank Bungarten, May 1996

Translated by Susan Marie Praeder