This is a well-played, well-recorded and well-documented version
of a sequence for guitar which deserves to be better known than
it is. It is a work which deserves to be heard, more often, as
a whole, rather than merely excerpted as part of one or another
recital.
Though the comparison
is a tempting one, it would probably be overstating the case
to claim that 24 Caprichos de Goya is the guitarist’s
Pictures from an Exhibition. Even if it doesn’t quite
have the expressive range and power of Mussorgsky’s work, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s
cycle has a distinctive poetry of its own, a subtle unity of
musical construction and a wealth of musical invention that
should please and satisfy many listeners.
After leaving Italy
in 1939 – as Mussolini introduced anti-Jewish legislation – Castelnuovo-Tedesco
settled in California, where he taught, composed works for the
concert hall – and wrote lots of film music. Perhaps his experience
in writing for cinema influenced his desire to write music in
response to some of Goya’s most striking visual images. Goya’s
Caprichos (Caprices) were executed between about 1793 and
1798, begun at a time when he was convalescing from the serious
- and mysterious - illness from which he suffered in 1792 and
which left him wholly deaf. The Caprichos brought into
Goya’s work an increased sense of the bizarre and the morbid,
here deployed in the service of a powerful satirical and moral
vision, the satiric targets including religious abuses, sexual
immorality and hypocrisy, medical frauds and aristocratic absurdity.
In total Goya made a series of 82 plates, etchings reinforced
with aquatint. A complete collection of the images can be seen
online here.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco
chose 23 of the Caprichos and added to them another plate, the
‘Sueño de la mentira y inconstancia’. The work, completed in
1961, was designed for Segovia - the composer had met the guitarist,
along with Manuel de Falla in Venice in 1932 - but he never
made the planned recording.
Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s
response to Goya’s often scabrous images has a greater elegance
than one might have expected and this is, perhaps, a limitation
on his capacity to the full range of their moods and the savagery
of some of their attacks. But much of what the composer does
is fascinating, often witty and always interesting. Fortunately,
the Naxos booklet does the work proud – providing the listener
with an image of every single one of the 24 plates of which
Castelnuovo-Tedesco created his musical ‘translations’.
Take, for example,
the fifteenth item in the sequence, ‘¿Si sabrá más el discipulo?’
(‘Or does the pupil know more?). Goya’s image – which is plate
no. 37 in the Caprichos – shows a wonderfully solemn
donkey teaching a younger donkey the alphabet. The image can
be interpreted in a number of ways; the donkey-teacher points
to the letter ‘A’, which might make the viewer think ‘A is for
Ass (Asno)’, but the ‘teacher’ himself seems unaware
of how he might be taken to be designating himself; the imagery
is part of Goya’s larger mockery of the professions in contemporary
Spain and of the decayed state of the educational system. The
image can also be read as a wider satire of the phenomenon according
to which, as George Bernard Shaw put it ‘Those who can do; those
who can’t teach’. Castelnuovo-Tedesco responds by interpreting
the image in terms of a particular application of his own. One
of the composer’s fellow residents in Los Angeles was Schoenberg,
master of more than a few ‘disciples’, musically speaking. It
is surely Schoenberg who Castelnuovo-Tedesco has - quite unfairly
– but when was satire ever fair? - in his piece. It begins with
a kind of ass-like bray, a tone-row is played (perhaps we should
imagine it put before the student by the teacher-donkey). It
is then transmuted - presumably by the student, who Castelnuovo-Tedesco,
remembering Goya’s title, wants to suggest knows better than
his donkey-like teacher - into a gavotte and, indeed, into two
musettes; the teacher appears to offer some donkey-like comments.
While considerably gentler than the visual original, the music
has a real satirical point and the whole is a delight!
Elsewhere, there
are many striking touches. In ‘El amor y la muerte’ the woman
and the dying man she holds in her arms are embodied in a plaintive
tango, by turns both blackly amorous and grief-struck. In ‘No
hubo remedio’ (Nothing can be done about it), Goya depicts a
woman sentenced to death by the Inquisition, surrounded by figures
of authority and by a grimly gleeful mob. Castelnuovo-Tedesco
writes, with black aptness, a passacaglia constructed of variations
on the Dies irae. Goya’s ‘¿De que mal morira?’ (What
illness will he die from?) shows us, quite splendidly, a donkey
in the guise of a doctor, taking a sick man’s pulse with his
hoof, a well-meaning bewilderment on the donkey-doctor’s face.
It’s a marvellous image of medicine with no real power to do
its patients any good. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s musical response
wittily - but with a kind of solicitude - plays with various
conventions of funeral music, including ‘A Funeral March for
a Marionette’ and an evocation of the funereal drum at its close.
It would be tedious
to continue enumerating the inventiveness of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s
response to Goya; enough has been said, I hope, to commend his
24 Caprichos de Goya to those who don’t know the work.
It is good to be able to suggest that such listeners make the
acquaintance of the work in this new recording by the Croatian
guitarist Zoran Dukic. He copes well with the often considerable
technical demands of the music; indeed, he is at his best in the
more complex and virtuosic passages. In some of the quieter, simpler
passages he doesn’t perhaps articulate the full poetry of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s
writing, in which regard Lily Afshar’s performance on Summit (Summit
Records DCD167) is more completely successful. But that is a minor
quibble and not a serious limitation to a generally fine performance,
a performance which benefits both of from a good recorded sound
and the advantages of a well-produced booklet.
This is a work which
deserves to find more hearers than it has hitherto attracted;
and this is a recording well-fitted to help it do so.
Glyn Pursglove
Zoran Dukic
(guitar)
