Prélude Composed six months after his arrival in Paris the Prélude was finished on 23 December 1925 within the impressionistic style. In it, Ponce uses modality for the melodic aspect, beginning ona minor dominant and employs the whole tone scale for the harmonic aspect, a resource already applied, but not so extensively, in some parts of the Sonata I resulting, in this case, in an extremely attractive piece with an exquisite atmosphere. Its publication took place in 1928 with Schott, but was edited by Segovia with some alterations and with the indication to use a capo, on the second fret, to raise the instrument’s tuning a whole tone with the resulting change in tonality from A to B minor. Tt seems that, at some point, there was the idea of writing a fugue for it, according to a Segovia letter of 26 August 1926, in which he said to Ponce that he expected the fugue with a sort of impatience that was renovated every day; however one year later, in a letter of 20 July 1927, this possibility seems to have been discarded when he tells Ponce: Thave studied the prelude in F#, which means in B minor, or if you prefer in both keys, since this is not defined until the end. I do not know if you remember that from the very beginning, since you brought it to the hotel at Christmas, it seemed to me as one of the nicest things you have made, in spite of its title and therefore of its dimensions. Today I persist in this judgment and play it really with enthusiasm. The capo softens a bit the sound of the normal guitar and it wins in subtlety and poetry. The end of your prelude results in a delicate embroidery of silk harmonies. There is only one chord, in the original manuscript, that cannot be played and in which 41Segovia suppressed the bass note; in this edition, I have suppressed the middle note. This happens in measure 33 where I decided to leave the E sharp of the bass, in order to continue the sequence that was initiated in measure 30 and that is kept until the end, while Segovia breaks it definitely at measure 35. I made the first recording of the Prélude in 1978 for EMI-Capitol. 43“pe 7 a == eeee ee a (ple pee py os = a goa er a,