Andrés Segovia, Father of Classical Guitar, at the Alhambra

Andrés Segovia first vis­it­ed the Alham­bra, the sto­ried 14th Cen­tu­ry Moor­ish palace in Grana­da, Spain, when he was ten years old. “It was here,” he said, “that I opened my eyes to the beau­ty of nature and art. To be here is to feel one­self to be near, very near, par­adise.”

Segovia is often called the father of clas­si­cal gui­tar. As a young boy he learned to play fla­men­co, the tra­di­tion­al music of his native Andalu­sia, but by the time he was a teenag­er he was tran­scrib­ing Bach and oth­er com­posers, adapt­ing music orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed for dif­fer­ent instru­ments. Over the course of his life­time, Segovia tran­scribed much of the clas­si­cal reper­toire, refined the stan­dard tech­nique, and estab­lished the gui­tar as a seri­ous instru­ment, bring­ing it out of the par­lors and into the con­cert halls.

In 1976, at the age of 84, Segovia returned to the Alham­bra to per­form for the doc­u­men­tary, Andrés Segovia: The Song of the Gui­tar. In the excerpt above, Segovia plays one of his favorite pieces, “The Leg­end of Asturias,” by Isaac Albéniz, who com­posed it for the piano as a pre­lude to his “Can­tos de España.” The com­plete doc­u­men­tary is avail­able on a two-film DVD, Andrés Segovia: In Por­trait.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gui­tar Prodi­gy from Karachi