Andrés Segovia:

The ‘god’ of the art of the guitar

In order to progress through life (and art too), you need a well-organized ‘personal mythology’.  You need heroes, demigods and gods.  Some you discover yourself, others had been there all the time. 

One of the ‘deities’ that others had discovered for me, before my time, was Andrés Segovia.  Indeed, I grew up in one of his ‘places of worship’, the guitar class of Dimitris Fampas.

Segovia was, in my early adolescence, the infallible, omniscient, ultimate master.  Our teacher Dimitris Fampas idolized him.  He was, after all, one of his ‘apostles’ on (Greek) earth!  I recall the photograph of Segovia in our teacher’s house: seated upon his throne, holding a sceptre (a cane in fact) and with a definitely noble bearing.  A real god!

He was omnipresent!  All the works that I loved somehow had to do with him, all the guitarists that I listened to and admired were ‘his’, or, at least, met with his approval.

In other words, the scene was set for full-blown adolescent antagonism.  And who is that gentleman, pray?  Why should everyone look up to him? Are there no others?

And then the clinching bit of information came, at a time when political commitment was a sine qua non: Segovia was one of those artists that were on good terms with the Franco regime in Spain!  That was the last straw: it was now up to us to burn the temples and tear down the statues!

Was it true?  Goodness knows.  And, after all, who would bother to verify such a story at the height of teenage rebellion?  Resistance was already under way through the quest for alternative gods and idols.  And if they happened to have suffered injustice and persecution at the hands of Segovia and his followers, so much the better!  Abel Carlevaro, Agustin Barrios among others.  Their recordings began to circulate from hand to hand and our puzzlement grew: how come they were so obscure, and he so famous?  Why did one keep running into that ubiquitous personage?  Segovia was behind every guitar, under every stone.      

You read about all this now, at the age of the Internet, and you shake your heads.  A storm in a teacup!       

A storm in a teacup indeed.  Yet inevitable.  The figure of Andrés Segovia loomed so large, it was so dominant in our student years that one needed time and maturity in order to put things into perspective; in order to become aware of the fact that, if it hadn’t been for him, the history of the art of the guitar would have been very different.  One needed time to realize what a great thing it was (in itself) that if you ‘turned’ the Villa-Lobos ‘stone’, you would find the name ‘Segovia’ written underneath.  And the same was true of the Ponce, Turina, Rodrigo, Tansman ‘stones’: his name was written under them too. 
And it always will be. 

 
A. Tansman - A. Segovia

 Time has a purifying effect, it cleanses great men of their minor faults.  It is true that his ‘guitar mania’ was an exaggeration.  Yet, one ought to consider how effective it proved, in the final analysis, for himself and his pupils.  And, in many respects, the attitude of his guitar era (which he had formed to a considerable degree) was infinitely preferable to the indifferent, casual and dabbling attitude that followed it.  

My only chance to see Andrés Segovia was while I was studying in England, a few years before his death.  He was giving a recital at a nearby town.  I do not regret choosing not to go.  I knew that he had reached an age when he should no longer appear on stage.  So I reserved the privilege of enjoying his recordings and admiring his technical perfection on the old “direct cut” records; and of remembering him as he used to be, handsome, noble: on his throne, as shown in the photo of the big book (a sort of gospel) entitled Andrés Segovia that always lay on the coffee table in the Fampas sitting-room.

Kostas Grigoreas
grigoreas@tar.gr
www.grigoreas.com

[English translation by Helena Grigorea]