Segovias Art of Musical Interpretation

Segovia's art has to be placed in historical perspective at the moment it was revealed. He became visible to the musical world since 1920, but significantly only since April 1924, when he gave his debut concert in Paris. Since then, his success in Europe - which was the milestone of his following success all over the world - was the result of a general attitude of three categories of people which no guitarist before him had been able to attract: musicians (composers, pianists, conductors, etc: all the most significant musicians of that epoque were his promoters and supporters, at various levels of involvement), reviewers (from the Russian Boris Asafev to the NewYorker Ollin Downs, all the maximum music opinion makers of the major media of the world applauded him in terms they seldom reserved to any performer), concert agents (he was all his career through a name in the list of the most exclusive and qualified impresarios of the world). Excellent guitarists had existed and performed before him and at that epoque people of the calibre of Miguel Llobet in Europe and Agustin Barrios in the Latin America were in the fullest of their career, still none of them had been able to achieve not even a small part of the acknowledgements Segovia received from people who had their fingers on the buttons of the power. What did they respond to, which Segovia - and nobody else - had revealed? A better technique? This is irrelevant at the eyes of those categories. They give as discounted that a concert player has to be a virtuoso, especially if he dares facing an audience as a recitalist, one performer before one thousand listeners. A more distinguished repertoire? This is true, but it happened only after Segovia had his career running - when he gave his debut concert in Paris he had only a few new works in his repertoire (Falla's Homenaje, two Moreno-Torroba works, the first Ponce piece, the Sevillana by Turina) - and it worked to confirm his star, not to switch it on...No, definitely it was something else. How to descrive this? You have to observe it in itself and from the viewpoint of his privilegiated listeners. In itself, Segovia revealed a new sound of the guitar. It was - like in the case of many other genius - a happily balanced synthesis of ingredients that had already existed in the art of his predecessors, but separately. He was able to produce a perfect fusion of the two mainstreams of the art of guitar playing that had disputed the scene of the 19th century: the Sor-Tarrega line (attacking the string with no nail, to produce a warm, fleshy tone) and the Aguado-Manjon line (attacking the string with nail, to produce a brilliant, crystal-like, extremely varied tone). He concealed depth and charm, substance and elegance. Of course, that tone would have not been enough in itself to win over the diffidence of the mentioned categories toward the guitar if not in association with a peculiar phrasing, a special way of shaping, curving and bending lines, of placing accents, of employing vibrato, rubato, fermatas, sforzando, dynamics, etc. in the way he did: he succeeded in creating a unity between his "voice" and his "breath", in other words he picked up what goes under the name of a style. It is silly to insist on the fact that he was not consistent with the current rules of stylistic approach to Bach or to the way at the same epoque Artur Rubinstein played Albniz: Segovia's "eccentric" approach to phrasing (within the frame of his refined musical taste) was precisely one of the ingredients which made his art unique, and instantly recognizable. Careful: all of these factors were "given" by the man to his listeners in an equally unique way: it was not only the "what," if was above all the "how", which decided the game. Those who have attended his concerts with a sensitive presence recall

perfectly that sense of serene authority which lead all what he was doing: he had a way of playing where everything, even the most illogical (rationally) musical choice was represented with a security, a confidence, a totally enlightened singlemindedness, that nobody could miss. I have watched in my life all the best interpreters - no matter of which instrument - and I can assure you that only a very minor part of them had achieved that level of direct vision of the music. Among guitarists, just one: Ida Presti. Nobody else. From the viewpoint of his sophisticated listeners - those who declared their highest score to him and allowed him to go along the career he runned clearly there was a favourable disposition to receive such a message. It was proposed at the right moment in the right place. The Paris of the Twenties. All the rest came from there. Without that milestone, all Segovia's career would have been much harder and perhaps it would have never reached its peaks. It happened that Segovia offered a new, "little" still exquisite, intimate still not sentimental, "wise" but nor rhetorical, musical product. Those people were tired of the remainders of Romantic piano wave, of the Grand Opera, of the Symphonic Poem (either French or, God save us!, German), they looked for snobistic pleasures, for rarities, and they were extremely demanding: Segovia gave them what they were looking for, and they made of him a new heroe. Those who complain no other Segovia is at the horizon, miss one fundamental evidence: even if he were here, the situation which brought him to the glory would never be repeated, and the new Segovia would never be recognized at the same extent. of the old one. Nobody needs him, nowadays. He would go around playing recitals in the guitar festivals... The kernel of Segovia's art gave fresh fruits during the Twenties and the Thirties. After the war, Segovia was a man recalling with homesickness of a culture which had gone with WWII. He played guitar for remembering the lost gardens of the Generalife - not unlike tre Arabian poets after the Christian Reconquista of Granada at the end of XVcentury - and, in spite of the glory surrounding him, he was a man who lived completely alone. Except his wife Emilita, he did not communicate with anybody. He encouraged and helped students which he did not really estimate. He understood that the marvelous season of the guitar had ended with him. Since then, the guitar recital as a spiritual-cultural event would have got completely lost. As it did in fact. This is why he followed giving concerts after the end of the Sixthies: in spite of the obvious deterioration of his skills, of the frequency of his memory lapses, of the progressive weakening of his tone, he was conscious that exposing his person and the remainders of his art to audiences was still an effective way of spreading around the message of the "Night in The Spanish Gardens". Yes, he knew all what guitarists (and his own ex-students in primis) told about him. And he knew that they had understood nothing of him and very little of the guitar. The last time I spoke to him at the phone he told me that he complained not having dedicated a wider part of his life to composition. I answered him that, with his playing, he had been much more creative than the majority of the composers whose music he had performed. Still, I know he was right. A new Segovia, since the second half of the 20th century, would have preferred composing than playing. Aere perennius. AG