A
modest man of modest means, Francisco
Tárrega (1852-1909) got off to a harrowing start in life. At the tender age
of three, left in the care of a neighbor by his hardworking parents, he was
flung headfirst into a ditch after wetting his bed. Horrified witnesses rescued
him, but he subsequently contracted an illness that left him sight-impaired for
the rest of his life. The vicious caretaker discretely vanished, never to be
seen again. Curiously, impaired vision seemed a leitmotiv in Tárrega’s youth.
Two of his early music teachers had the nickname “El Ciego” (the blind man),
one being completely blind, the other nearly so. Blindness also figures into a
revealing anecdote. A teenaged Tárrega, roaming the streets of Madrid, encountered a
blind beggar playing the guitar. The beggar wasn’t a good player, and had
earned no money for his trouble. Tárrega borrowed the beggar’s guitar and began
playing, attracting a throng of admirers with his beautiful performance. He
then passed the hat, collected a large sum, and handed it and the guitar to the
beggar. He then went home, too penniless to afford a meal for himself.
At
age four, Joaquín Turina Pérez
(1882-1949) astonished his middle-class family by skillfully improvising on an
accordion given to him by a housemaid. His artistically inclined father, a fine
painter himself, recognized his son’s talent and cultivated it. Like many
Spanish composers of his day, Turina was at first strongly influenced by French
music, and studied composition with Vincent d’Indy. But a 1907
conversation in a Paris café with Isaac Albéniz and Manuel de Falla
inspired him to change his tune, and he became one of Spain’s most
ardently nationalist composers. Writing of this meeting four years later,
Turina declared: “I realized that music should be an art, and not a
diversion for the frivolity of women and the dissipation of men. We were three
Spaniards gathered together in that corner of Paris, and it was our duty to fight bravely
for the national music of our country.” So perhaps it was inevitable that
eventually he would compose for Spain’s
most famous guitar virtuoso, Andrés Segovia. His 1932 Hommage à Tárrega is comprised of two brief but
vigorous movements. Oddly, it sounds nothing like Tárrega, and its obvious
reference to flamenco is surprising, considering Segovia’s studied avoidance of the guitar’s
flamenco heritage. But maybe Turina knew his dedicatee well. It’s rumored that Segovia in private could
do some pretty mean flamenco playing—indeed, his first guitar lessons were with
a flamenco player.
Swiss composer Hans Haug (1900-1967), though closely associated with Segovia at various times, seldom caught a break in finding a champion for his guitar works. His first work for the guitar was his Concertino for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra, written for the 1950 guitar composition competition at the “Accademia Musicale Chigiana” in Italy. Among the judges was Segovia, and Haug’s Concertino won first prize in its category. Although it was promised that Segovia would premiere it and assist in its publication, he never performed it, and Concertino wasn’t published until three years after Haug’s death. Segovia, however, thought well enough of Haug to record his first solo guitar work, Alba. He also invited Haug in 1961 to teach composition courses at the summer music academy in Santiago de Compostella. There Haug composed his Prélude, Tiento et Toccata. Once again, the work didn’t appeal to Segovia. Yet Segovia carefully preserved the manuscript, as he did with many other works written for him that he didn’t play. That he never performed these works might have boiled down to time—so much music was dedicated to Segovia that perhaps he simply didn’t have time to get to it all. In a conversation with a fellow guitarist, Segovia seemed almost contrite about this huge backlog of unperformed music: “I did nothing with this, but I have no reason to prevent you from doing something, if you like it, and if you have the time, skill, and patience that I did not find in myself.” Prélude, Tiento et Toccata was eventually published in 2003, resurrected in “The Andrés Segovia Archive,” a collection of unpublished works dedicated to Segovia and edited by the indefatigable Angelo Gilardino.
Trained mainly as a pianist, Frederic Mompou i Dencausse
(1893-1987) at first didn’t consider composition as a possible career. But his
profound shyness poisoned his attitude toward performing, and he increasingly
drifted into composing. Known mainly for short piano works, Mompou became a connoisseur’s choice among Spanish
composers. Biographer Wilfrid Meller wrote: “Federico Mompou is almost
the only living composer known to me who reveals what I have called the reality
of Spain,
as opposed to the picture-post-card version.” His 1962 Suite compostelana is in six movements
of exquisite delicacy. What Mompou said of himself is also apt to this inward
looking music: “I hate bravura music, the big things. I am a simple
person. I compose on the moment, when I feel the inspiration. I don’t think of
being listened to by thousands of people or just one person. I just compose
because I have the inspiration and the need to compose.”
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) had a
lifelong love for the sound of the guitar. “The harmonic effects produced
unconsciously by our guitarists,” he wrote, “are one of the miracles of natural
art.” Yet he never was entirely comfortable writing for such a dauntingly
idiomatic instrument. Nonetheless,
few Spanish works in the guitar’s twentieth century repertoire are more justly
admired than his sole composition for the guitar: Homenaje. Written in 1920,
it’s an anguished and profound lament on the death of Claude Debussy. The piece
is brief—only seventy measures—and if one heeds Falla’s curious suggested tempo
(quarter note=60), it clocks in
at a brisk two and a half minutes. Understandably, almost no one plays it that
fast. One might argue that Homenaje
says as much about its creator as it does its subject. Pianist Artur Rubinstein said of Falla: “He
looked like an ascetic monk in civilian clothes. Always dressed in black, there
was something melancholy about his bald head, his penetrating dark eyes and
bushy eyebrows, even his smile was sad.” Characteristically, Igor Stravinsky
was more laconic, describing Falla as “modest and withdrawn as an oyster.”
During his long life, Federico Moreno Torroba
(1891-1982) was more than a composer, and for many years served as president of
the Sociedad General de Autores de España. In this capacity, one of his duties
was to enforce royalty payments, something that didn’t endear him to those who
preferred to perform without paying. At one point, he felt he needed to hire
bodyguards to protect himself. In spite of this, Torroba maintained his
equanimity, and even could tweak the noses of those whose rights he zealously
protected: “The composer is a very strange being. He always believes that his
work is not sufficiently accepted, rewarded, or promoted.” Torroba was among
the first Spanish composers to write for Segovia,
beginning with his 1924 Suite Castellana. From there, he
contributed enormously to the guitar repertoire, including ten concertos with
guitar.Composed in 1928, Burgalesa is a lyrical and evocative miniature.
Antonio José Martínez Palacios (1902-1936) was a young composer of whom much was expected. Maurice Ravel said of him: “He will become the Spanish composer of our century.” But Spain in the 1930s was a dangerous place to be an artist, especially a liberal one. José was loosely associated with the “Generation of '27," an artistic movement that championed the avante- garde. It also didn’t help that José and other scholars founded a liberal magazine in 1935. It was probably for this reason that he was rounded up and executed by a Falangist firing squad. (In a bitter irony, the Falange party’s early manifesto was entitled the "27 Points.") José’s 1933 Sonata para Guitarra is his only major work for guitar. He dedicated it to his friend, guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza, who gave a partial premiere 1934. But the sonata faded into obscurity until its full premiere by Ricardo Iznaola in a 1981 radio broadcast. Iznaola calls it “perhaps the greatest piece for solo guitar ever written in Spain.”
- Tom Poore