Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

plays, and the two figures in the painting disappear as if shot by the two men in
the lower right-hand corner of the painting.
Boccherini’s Fandango is marked as a leitmotif associated with Goya’s
mind from the very beginning of the film. After the opening credits, presented
over a dead bull reminiscent of a Rembrandt painting as Saura claimed
elsewhere, 148
[s]e escucha el Fandango del Quinteto en re mayor opus 37 de Boccherini,
que a veces tarareaba Goya con escasa afinación debido a su sordera. De
esta música y de las vísceras del buey, carne, grasa, sebo, sangre
coagulada, va surgiendo el rostro de un hombre anciano que se mueve
inquieto entre las sabanas de lino de la cama estilo imperio (Saura, Goya
20). 149
Saura thus states explicitly that Goya’s features emerge not only from the
visual aspects but also from the music. Throughout the film, the music occurs
mostly during the artist’s flashbacks, marking or perhaps evoking his
reminiscences and his memory. The brief motif heard in this scene is a Minuet, a
joyful dance hardly fitting to accompany the Pinturas negras or the Sueño de la
razón. Thus rather than illustrating or enhancing the themes of the paintings,
Boccherini’s music here emphasizes that the scene derives from Goya’s
imagination, but that it has reality status like his other flashbacks, that to him, it
148 In the above-cited interview, Saura stresses that the credits sequence does not refer so much to
Buñuel as to a “beautiful painting” by Rembrandt, The Bull. This quote is deliberate, since Goya
said (and does so twice, with a slight variation, in this film) that his great masters were Velázquez,
Rembrandt, and nature (Urrero Peña 34).
149 “The Fandango of the Quintet in D major opus 37 by Boccherini is heard, which Goya
sometimes hummed with little refinement due to his deafness. From this music and from the
entrails of the bull, flesh, fat, sebum, coagulated blood, gradually the face of an old man emerges
who moves restlessly between the linen sheets of the imperial-style bed” (my transl.).
114