Brett Dean

Three Caprichos after Goya

Dean's short pieces can be traced back to a concert project of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 2003 at which a number of compositions were commissioned for the guitarist Jürgen Ruck on the basis of Goya's Caprichos. This famous graphic cycle of 1799 is a deeply moving portrait of a hopeless society. Dean gave the three scenes chosen by him (a humpbacked old man and his poor young bride, a daughter who has come into money and no longer recognises her destitute mother, a dancer pestered by three gallows birds) a musical form that is both sonorous and oppressive as well as pictorial and virtuoso - a fascinating dialogue between the arts.