Andrés Segovia is arguably the most influential classical guitarist of all time.

While that’s a huge statement to make, it doesn't come from nowhere. Segovia’s obituary  was on the cover of the New York Times. His name was known inside and outside of the classical music world for nearly a century.

Before Segovia, the classical guitar was a cafe instrument - it wasn’t seen as suitable for the concert hall, and thus concert music audiences didn’t pay it the attention they did other ensembles, such as the string quartet or orchestra.

So how did he do it? How did Segovia single handedly transform the public’s perception of the classical guitar, and build one of the greatest classical music legacies of all time?

In this post, we’ll take you deep into the origins, technique, and musical legacy of the legendary classical guitarist Andrés Segovia.

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Segovia’s Early Life

Let’s dig a bit into the context of Segovia’s musical upbringing.

Segovia was born in Linares, Spain, to parents who expected their child to grow up to become a successful lawyer. 

Segovia rejected this expectation and consistently developed his guitar technique on his own time. For that matter, there were no good guitar instructors available to him, so he self-taught everything he had learned at an early age, inspired by merely his own musical intuitions.

This idea of surpassing expectations in new and surprising ways is something that would re-appear throughout Segovia’s life as he carved out his story.

Initial reception

Segovia’s performance career showed promise from the early age of 14. Within the first 2 decades of the 20th Century, Segovia went from a fascinating anomaly from Linares to a name known throughout the European continent. 

Thousands of eager listeners would pile into massive venues to listen to Segovia play, often comically dwarfing the solo musician in scale. 

Much of his initial attention and recognition came from his innovative and unique approach to performance. 

Segovia relied on several things to stand apart:

• He wouldn’t use microphones, relying on very strong acoustical projection to reach his massive audiences.
• He had a strong stage presence.
• He had one of the most developed expressive languages for musicians of his time - something that required the careful attention of audiences.

The concerts from his prime are remembered with great fondness. Many people around from his time will still recall how much passion and musical greatness was present in his performances.

Now many would assume his “prime” to be a relatively small window in time.

False. Segovia’s “prime” performing years are considered to be 1909 to 1987.

That’s the majority of the entire 20th Century.

This musical and physical stamina proved the deep passion Segovia had been sewing into his interpretations since a young child, and showed that great artists aren’t just blips in time, but legacies that last decades and decades.

Segovia’s “invention” of the classical guitar

In the early 20th Century, when Segovia was starting out his career, one of the biggest hurdles he would have to overcome is the lack of an established classical tradition for the classical guitar.

Classical music in this time was very much considered a musical tradition that focused on music for the piano, cello, violin, and voice, with the range of performable chamber works stemming primarily from the Bach-Brahms Common Practice Period.

This said, Segovia didn’t have a classical tradition to build on for the guitar - he had to invent one from scratch.

The entire notion of the classical guitar that we understand today can arguably be traced back to the performance and branding efforts of Segovia.

Building a classical guitar repertoire from scratch

The first avenue of this out-of-nowhere tradition that Segovia built came through his vast amounts of transcriptions and commissioning.

While today we often associate composers like Albéniz, Bach, Granados, and Dowland with the classical guitar, we may often forget that these composers never wrote a single note for the guitar.

Segovia had to effectively convince the public that the guitar had a rich classical history, and to do so, he adapted many of the great chamber works of the Common Practice Period for the guitar in a highly idiomatic manner.

Segovia created more than 150 transcriptions for the guitar, more often relying on loose yet idiomatic transcriptions than strict yet difficult to play transcriptions.

These include transcriptions of Bach’s cello suites, Albéniz’s Asturias (Leyenda), J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, the list just goes on and on.

And that’s just transcriptions. Let’s now talk about his commissions, and explore the militant aesthetic opinions of Segovia that largely defined the sound of the instrument.

Segovia’s musical perspective

Since Segovia was the pioneer of the genre, he was responsible for commissioning the entirety of the early classical guitar canon.

The composers on the receiving end of the commissions were names such as Villa-Lobos, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ponce, Torroba, Turina, Mompou, and many more. 

Now while most commissioning in other classical music applications looks like the fostering of a contemporary body of work that carries the repertoire forward, Segovia took the opposite direction.

Segovia was primarily interested in developing a neo-romantic body of work, fully in line with this idea of inventing a classical tradition out of thin air.

The works he commissioned had very tonal and romantic sensibilities, and Segovia rejected any notion towards the contemporary or even popular/folk styles that emerged in his time.

Adding to this point, Stravinsky himself had offered to write a piece for the maestro, whom Segovia rejected.

The modern classical guitar vs the “Segovia” classical guitar

This full-blown rejection of musical innovation in favor of the preservation of a Segovia-invented classical tradition was the defining philosophy of the classical guitar for decades.

So where are we now?

Segovia has been cemented into the guitar hall of fame, but for the sake of artistic liberty and growth, many of his aesthetic philosophies have been put on the shelf.

The modern classical guitar world has seen an explosion in innovative works written for the guitar in the last 50 years, creating a musical trajectory on par with the other prominent instruments of the general classical tradition. 

And while the level of artistic excellence in the classical guitar is continuing to grow, it’s important to pay homage to the person who launched the trajectory of the instrument.

On tonebase, we’ve created a library with exclusive interviews and courses from the biggest names in classical guitar from the previous half-century.

The expansive library features players like Pepe Romero, Ana Vidovic, Andrew York, Sergio Assad, Leo Brouwer, and many, many more.

To access this incredible resource, along with weekly live event invitations, custom annotated scores and workbooks, and a dedicated forum of passionate classical guitarists, click here to sign up for a free trial. 

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