Miguel Llobet

Llobet met Tárrega in 1892 and studied under him at Barcelona's municipal conservatory, but by his own account there was no method to it: "more than by learning it, I experimented with my guitar technique," runs a quotation preserved by his Italian biographer Bruno Tonazzi, describing afternoons spent watching Tárrega play an exercise, then going home to reverse-engineer it alone. Emilio Pujol, a guitarist who knew both men, wrote in Spanish that Llobet worked "en oposición a la estética de Tárrega" — in opposition to his teacher's aesthetic — chasing each string's own separate color where Tárrega wanted one blended tone across all six.

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1889

Preludio No. 2 in A minorFrancisco Tárrega

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1889

RomanzaMiguel Llobet

listen forThe clearest documented exchange is the earliest one: in 1889 Tárrega dedicated his Preludio No. 2 in A minor to his eleven-year-old student, and Llobet answered with his first ever composition, a Romanza built on a related melodic shape. No recording of Llobet playing a Tárrega piece survives — his own 1920s discography contains none — so the debt shows up as two scores in conversation, not a shared performance.

Albéniz never wrote a note for guitar, but Llobet spent years transcribing his flamenco-colored piano suites — work the editor Ronald Purcell judged masterful, insisting the transcriptions "have not to this day been equaled." The two were also Paris contemporaries: Llobet settled there in 1904 and fell in with the same avant-garde circle, the Société des Apaches, where Albéniz traded ideas with Debussy and Ravel — a scene his biographer Robert Phillips says meant Llobet "could not help but be influenced."

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1906

Evocación (Iberia, Book 1)Isaac Albéniz

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1925

EvocaciónMiguel Llobet

listen forAlbéniz's own "Evocación," the modal, rocking opener of his suite Iberia, made its case for the guitar before anyone touched a string — Llobet's transcription, cut around 1925 as a duet with María Luisa Anido, is the proof. Compare Albéniz's piano original against that duet recording and the same rocking figure survives intact, just split across two guitars' distinct timbres instead of ten piano fingers.

Alegre was Llobet's first teacher, sought out in 1889 after a guitar recital in Barcelona convinced the boy he needed real instruction. Emilio Pujol, who knew Llobet personally, wrote that "poco tiempo bastó para que aquel niño agotara toda la experiencia y arte de D. Magín Alegre, uno de los más destacados profesores de su tiempo" — that the boy exhausted everything the well-regarded local teacher had within a short time. After roughly three years under Alegre, Llobet moved on to formal study with Tárrega.