walking upstream…
Andrés Segovia
photo: alessandro merletti · public domain ↗Andrés Segovia
sourcesThe New York Times — "Andres Segovia Is Dead at 94; His Crusade Elevated Guitar" (obituary; Tárrega technique debt, Bach/Chaconne mission) · Current Biography, June 1964 — "Andres Segovia, Spanish Guitarist" (self-taught framing, Tárrega influence, Bach transcription belief) · Classical Guitar — Graham Wade, "Segovia2 · Robert Phillips, DMA essay, University of Miami (2002) — documentary evidence of the Segovia–Llobet lessons; Ronald Purcell's recordings comparison · Christopher Berg — "Bach, Busoni, Segovia, and the Chaconne" (musicological analysis tracing the Chaconne transcription's debt to Busoni) · CSUN University Library — "Bach, Segovia, and the Rise of Classical Guitar on the Concert Stage" (Segovia's 1947 essay, Bach transcription history)
In May 1964, a British reporter asked Segovia about a band sweeping the world; he wanted no part of it. "I do not think it is anything to do with art as I know it… We guitarists — or any serious musicians — need the stern discipline of life-long practice, many years of self-denial." He'd lived that discipline since a Linares, Spain childhood spent teaching himself the guitar over his lawyer father's objections, unable to find a teacher he trusted. Debuts in Paris in 1924 and New York in 1928 opened decades of touring and recording that made "classical guitarist" a viable career and built a modern repertory almost from scratch. At seventy-five, summing up his life's work for The New York Times, he named one goal outright: to fill the world's concert halls with young listeners, "and I am very glad to steal them from the Beatles."
the sound in question
1939
Recuerdos de la AlhambraAndrés Segovia
walk the tributaries ↓
Johann Sebastian Bach1720s · Baroque / Classical
Few had heard Bach on a guitar before Segovia; his transcriptions, especially of the Chaconne from the Violin Partita No. 2, were "revelations of his talent and the instrument's potential," his New York Times obituary said, becoming "one of his invariable triumphs." But the transcription itself carries a hidden debt: the guitar scholar Christopher Berg's bar-by-bar analysis found Segovia's added harmonies and dynamics trace not to Bach's violin score alone but to the pianist Ferruccio Busoni's own 1897 arrangement — a transcription of a transcription Segovia never publicly acknowledged.
listen: upstream & here
1720
Chaconne, from Partita for Solo Violin No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004Johann Sebastian Bach
1955
Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1004 (arr. Segovia)Andrés Segovia
listen forBach wrote the Chaconne for a single unaccompanied violin, sustaining four-note chords only by breaking them into fast arpeggios; Segovia's guitar transcription fills those same chords out into full, ringing harmony a guitar can hold that a violin can't. Listen for the added bass notes under the famous D-minor theme and the thickened chords in the middle variations — exactly the passages Berg traces to Busoni's piano arrangement rather than Bach's original. The result is a bigger, more Romantic sound than the violin version, proof of the case Segovia was making for his instrument.
Francisco Tárrega1880s–1900s · Classical Guitar / Romantic
Segovia's own account of his conversion is exact: hearing a friend, Gabriel Ruiz de Almodóvar, play some of Tárrega's Preludes, he "felt like crying, laughing, even like kissing the hands of a man who could draw such beautiful sounds from the guitar," and a sudden disgust for the flamenco he'd been playing followed. He never studied with Tárrega, who died when Segovia was sixteen, so the debt is secondhand: his obituary in The New York Times says he built his technique "chiefly on his own intuitions and what he could learn of the methods of" the guitarist.
listen: upstream & here
1892
Capricho ÁrabeFrancisco Tárrega
Capricho ÁrabeAndrés Segovia
listen forPlay Tárrega's "Capricho Árabe" — from his catalogue of Romantic salon-guitar showpieces — against Segovia's own recording of the same piece, and the debt is unmistakable: both ride the same undulating tremolo, a rapid three-finger repetition on one string colored by a slow chromatic bassline, and the same modal, "Arabic" harmonic tint drawn from Andalusia. Segovia performed the piece as early as a 17 June 1917 recital in Granada, on a program listing two other Tárrega works alongside it — decades before he committed it to record, still playing the tremolo Tárrega had made the guitar's signature gesture.
Miguel Llobet1900s–1920s · Classical Guitar / Catalan Folk
Segovia's autobiography calls him self-taught, but the guitarist Emilio Pujol, another Tárrega pupil, left a different account: around 1917, Segovia asked Pujol himself for lessons, was turned down, and referred instead to Miguel Llobet, whom he studied under for "some four or five" lessons before Llobet ended them, frustrated by his student's resistance to correction. Pujol's own biographical sketch of Llobet lists Segovia flatly among his students, prompting one Llobet scholar to write there is "no clearer refutation… of Segovia's claims to being self-taught." Llobet, Tárrega's prize pupil, was Segovia's most direct link to that older Barcelona tradition.
listen: upstream & here
El Testament d'AmeliaMiguel Llobet
El Testament d'Amelia (Llobet arr.)Andrés Segovia
listen forLlobet arranged the Catalan folk song "El Testament d'Amelia" as a signature piece; Segovia later recorded the identical arrangement, crediting Llobet by name on the disc. Compare them and listen for the shared phrasing: a slow, unaccompanied melodic line let ring over sparse open-string harmony, each note given space rather than blurred by tremolo. The guitar scholar Ronald Purcell argued the debt runs deeper than one shared score, writing that "this stylistic influence can be heard when comparing Llobet's Parlophone Electric recordings… with Segovia's Angel recordings" — the same unhurried rubato and singing tone passed from teacher to reluctant student.