Andrés Segovia: The Man Who Made the Guitar Serious
In 1935, in a small hall far from the salons where the guitar was still treated as parlor furniture, Andrés Segovia played the first public performance of Bach's Chaconne on a six-string guitar — a piece written for solo violin, dense with implied polyphony, that no one had thought the instrument capable of sustaining. He had already spent a quarter-century convincing concert promoters, composers, and audiences that an instrument associated with cafés and folk song belonged on the same programs as the piano and violin. By the time he died in 1987, he had played something like 5,402 recitals and turned a handful of composers' skepticism into a permanent repertoire.
A Self-Made Technique
Segovia was born in Linares, in Andalusia, in 1893 and raised by an aunt and uncle in Granada after an unhappy start with the violin. He never had the guitar lesson he wanted most: he sought out Francisco Tárrega, the great guitarist-composer of the era, but Tárrega died before they could meet. Segovia described his education instead as carrying out "the double function of professor and pupil in the same body" — working out, largely alone, how the instrument should be played. What he arrived at broke with the school around him. Where the Tárrega tradition favored plucking with a blend of fingertip and nail, Segovia used the nails alone, arguing that nail contact gave the string "timbre differences and colour variation" and enough volume to fill a concert hall rather than a drawing room. He also angled his right hand further from the strings than convention dictated, trading intimacy for a rounder, more projected tone, and he was among the first major players to adopt nylon strings over gut once they became available, for their steadier pitch and tone. None of this was academic showmanship — it was engineering a folk instrument to survive on a symphony-hall stage next to a full orchestra.
Building a Repertoire From Nothing
The classical guitar had almost no serious concert literature when Segovia started, so he manufactured one, commissioning and cajoling composers who had never written for the instrument. Manuel Ponce became a close collaborator after they met in Mexico in 1923, producing sonatas that anchored Segovia's programs for decades. Heitor Villa-Lobos dedicated his Twelve Études to him. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote the Concerto Op. 99, generally regarded as the first substantial twentieth-century guitar concerto, which Segovia premiered in Montevideo in 1939. Joaquín Rodrigo composed the Fantasía para un gentilhombre for him in 1954, and Federico Moreno Torroba's Sonatina had its Paris premiere under Segovia's fingers in 1925. He turned some composers away too — he rejected pieces by Frank Martin and Darius Milhaud that didn't suit his musical taste, a reminder that the repertoire he built reflected his own aesthetic as much as the composers' ambitions. Alongside the new commissions he built a parallel body of transcriptions, adapting Bach, Albéniz, and Granados for six strings, and edited older guitar literature — his 1945 edition of Fernando Sor's twenty études became, and largely remains, the standard entry point for serious students.
The Recitals and the Records
Segovia's first American tour, in 1928, was arranged with the help of the violinist Fritz Kreisler, itself a signal that a major instrumentalist thought the guitarist worth vouching for. His first recordings, made in 1927 for His Master's Voice, predate the tour; over the following half-century he recorded roughly forty LPs, a body of work capped by the 1958 Grammy Award for Best Classical Performance and a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1986, a year before his death. He kept performing into his nineties, giving his final recital in Miami Beach in April 1987, weeks before he died of a heart attack in Madrid at ninety-four.
Teaching and Its Discontents
From the 1950s on Segovia ran influential master classes, most famously at Música en Compostela in Spain and, in the summer of 1964, at the University of California, Berkeley, where students included Christopher Parkening and Michael Lorimer. Julian Bream and John Williams, the two guitarists most responsible for carrying the instrument's prestige into the later twentieth century, are usually counted in his lineage even though neither studied with him in any sustained formal sense — a fact Segovia himself acknowledged wryly, saying he had "pupils" all over the world he had never met. The relationship was not uniformly warm. Williams later criticized Segovia's teaching as "dogmatically authoritarian," accusing him of bullying students into a single approach and dismissing entire traditions, including South American guitar music, that didn't fit his idea of what the instrument should do. That tension — between the man who single-handedly built the instrument's legitimacy and the narrowness of taste that came with doing it his way — runs through nearly every serious account of his influence.
Honors
Segovia's stature was formalized late in his life: in 1981 King Juan Carlos I ennobled him as Marqués de Salobreña, and he collected ten honorary doctorates, the Danish Sonning Award in 1974, and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1985, one of the highest honors in European music. An asteroid discovered in 1989, 3822 Segovia, carries his name, as does the guitar competition run in his honor by the European Guitar Teachers Association.
Why Andrés Is Called a Genius
The case for Segovia's genius is not built on invention in the sense composers or scientists claim it — he wrote only minor works of his own, mostly études — but on something rarer: the sustained, deliberate act of building an entire concert tradition around an instrument that had none. That took a specific kind of intelligence, closer to an architect's than a composer's — diagnosing exactly what the guitar lacked (repertoire, technique suited to large halls, institutional respect) and solving each problem in turn over sixty years, from reworking his own right-hand mechanics to talking composers who had never considered the instrument into writing for it. The Guitar Foundation of America credits him with having "revitalized and revolutionized" playing technique while expanding the repertoire by "dozens of worthwhile pieces," and virtually every prominent classical guitarist since traces some part of their technique or repertoire to a choice Segovia made. The honest counter-case, made most pointedly by John Williams, is that Segovia's genius shaded into rigidity — that his taste, imposed with real authority over decades of teaching, foreclosed as much as it opened, and that the guitar world he built in his own image had blind spots, particularly toward South American and popular idioms, that took another generation to correct.
Legacy
Segovia did not just play the guitar well; he manufactured the conditions under which the guitar could be taken seriously at all, and nearly every classical guitarist working today performs inside a repertoire, a technique, and an institutional respect that did not exist before he built them.
Achievements
- Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic
- Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1986
- Léonie Sonning Music Prize — 1974
- Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal — 1986
- Instruments: classical guitar
- Genres: classical music
