Andrés Segovia: The Man Who Wouldn’t Take No for an Answer

Andrés Segovia’s father broke two, perhaps three guitars.

He did it not out of rage, but out of a belief shared by almost all of Spain at the end of the nineteenth century: the guitar was not a respectable instrument. It belonged in taverns, street songs and flamenco nights, not in the hands of a boy whose family imagined him one day as a lawyer.

The boy kept playing in secret.

A self-taught boy in Granada

Andrés Segovia was born in 1893 in Linares, Andalusia. His family had little money, so he grew up largely with an uncle and aunt, who later took him to Granada for a better education.

They tried to steer him toward “serious” instruments. He took lessons on the violin, the cello and the piano, but none of them moved him. Then he heard a flamenco guitarist play for the first time, and he knew what he wanted.

The problem was that there was no one to learn from. Granada had no teacher of classical guitar. So he taught himself, from a few theory books and old scores, trying, failing and trying again. Even some guitarists of the time criticised his technique, because it resembled no one else’s.

In 1909, at the age of 16, he gave his first public concert in Granada.

The guitar he couldn’t pay for

A few years later, in 1912, Segovia arrived in Madrid. He needed a good guitar for a concert, so he walked into the workshop of luthier Manuel Ramírez with a modest plan: to rent an instrument.

Ramírez handed him a guitar to try. Segovia began to play.

When he finished, the luthier would not hear of any rental. He gave him the guitar and refused all payment. That instrument is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Stubbornness

The concert halls of Europe were not waiting for the guitar. The piano and the violin had centuries of music written for them, while the guitar had very little. Many musicians saw it as an accompanying instrument, too weak to carry a recital on its own.

Segovia did not try to convince them with speeches. He walked onto the stage.

When the repertoire was not enough, he built it. He transcribed Bach for the guitar, including the famous Chaconne for solo violin, one of the hardest challenges a guitarist could set himself. He adapted music written for the lute and the harpsichord.

Then he did something even more important: he began persuading composers to write for the guitar. Manuel Ponce, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Alexandre Tansman, Heitor Villa-Lobos and many others composed for him. Most of them did not understand how the instrument worked, so Segovia worked with them step by step, explaining what sounded good and correcting passages that could not be played.

The world listens

In 1924 he played in Paris, and the concert brought him international recognition. In 1928 he made his New York debut, where critics wrote that he drew from the guitar the colours of half a dozen instruments. Tours of Europe, Latin America and Japan followed.

He taught in Siena, Santiago de Compostela, Geneva and Los Angeles, and insisted that the guitar be studied in conservatories just like the violin or the piano. The generation of guitarists he shaped, Ida Presti and Alexandre Lagoya among them, carried on what he had started.

In 1958 he won a Grammy. In 1981, the King of Spain made him Marquis of Salobreña.

To the very end

In April 1987, at the age of 94, Segovia gave one more recital, in Miami.

The boy whose father had broken his guitars had played on stage for nearly eighty years. He did not wait for the world to accept the guitar before believing in it. He played until the world had no choice but to listen.

GuitarStory — The stories behind the strings.

Sources

Andrés Segovia, An Autobiography of the Years 1893–1920

Guitarras Ramírez – Manuel Ramírez: https://guitarrasramirez.com/en/?p=16875

Universidad de Cádiz – Andrés Segovia Torres: https://wwwp.uca.es/andres-segovia-torres/?lang=en

Augustine Strings – Andrés Segovia: https://augustinestrings.com/artist/andr%C3%A9ssegovia.html

Bach Cantatas – Andrés Segovia: https://bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Segovia-Andres.htm