Biblioteca de la Guitarra y Cuerda Pulsada

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco selected 23 pictures from Goya’s Caprichos, and a further etching in similar style, as inspiration for an extended sequence of guitar solos, completing the work in 1961. The following notes present possible interpretations of Goya’s images (many of which are profoundly ambiguous and function at various symbolic and ironic levels of meaning), as well as descriptions of the music accompanying each picture (the number of the relevant plate is shown in brackets). In Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 24 Caprichos de Goya, Op. 195, the composer allows his own imagination and artistic instincts to shape his individual response to each work of art rather than following any facile programmatic patterns. XIII. ¿Quién más rendido? (Which of them is more overwhelmed?) (Plate No. 27) This picture shows a social fop importuning the favours of a woman in the street, her companions looking on in the background. The superficiality of this behaviour is ironically characterized in the music by means of the Rigaudon, a courtship dance from southern France popular in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A middle section marked ‘a little sentimental (but in tempo)’, offers a contrast, evoking the flattering words of the man before the Rigaudon strikes up again. Francesco Cascarano,...