A Question of Repertoire

I'm a classical guitarist, though these days I often call myself a composer. I had an inkling of what this might mean when I went to my first final instrumental exam and one of the faculty jokingly said: "What are you going to play, guitar boogie shuffle?" One of the things that prevents music departments from sliding into the progressive morass of English departments is that there is usually a fair emphasis on performance. Nearly all music majors, even if they are not in the performance stream, have individual private lessons and since these are expensive to provide, they have to do final exams on their instruments showing that they can actually play something. Performance majors, at least towards the end of their program, have to give public recitals, also marked by a jury.

But the classical guitar has an uncomfortable niche in the classical music world as the electric and steel string guitars of popular music are better known. Here's that tune by the Ventures:

That's before my time as a guitarist, but it was right in the wheelhouse of the faculty examiner. It was repertoire he knew, but he had never heard of the big composers for guitar: Tárrega, Sor, Giuliani, Ponce, Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Throughout the history of the guitar there have been attempts for it to enter the musical mainstream (at least the classical one). In 16th century Spain, the primary domestic solo instrument was the vihuela, a double-strung guitar, basically. In the rest of Europe, the lute was very important, though alongside other instruments like the organ, harp and virginal. In the later 17th century the guitar very nearly broke into the mainstream in the form of the Baroque guitar with composers like Robert de Visée and Francesco Corbetta who were important composer/performers in the royal courts. The lute and theorbo also enjoyed some popularity in the person of people like Sylvius Leopold Weiss. But the trend failed to reach completion and the instrument(s) faded.

Another attempt was made in the late 18th century with Spanish guitarist composers like Fernando Sor and Italians like Mauro Giuliani. We could also count Wenzel Thomas Matiegka in this number. This attempt was even less successful as the harpsichord and piano completely triumphed over the plucked instruments in the person of the big three composers: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Yet another attempt to assail the ramparts of the classical mainstream was made in the mid-20th century by the great artist Andrés Segovia who really did take the Spanish guitar from the streets and put it on the concert hall stage worldwide. When he was alive he could tour everywhere and easily fill 2,000 seat concert halls. With the spread of his disciples like Oscar Ghiglia and pupils like John Williams and other virtuosos like Julian Bream, the future of the guitar seemed to be finally assured.

But the problem, as always, was repertoire. The sad truth is that there is no guitar repertoire that is absolutely essential. Think on that. The vihuela music of Luys Milan is less essential than the lute music of Francesco da Milano. The courtly guitar music of de Visée and Corbetta is far less significant than the harpsichord music of Couperin and Rameau and good god, the lute music of Weiss is vanishingly trivial compared to the harpsichord music of J. S. Bach. There is no possible way to equate the guitar music of Sor, Giuliani and Matiegka with the piano music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. In the 20th century, there are the few and feeble pieces of Tárrega, Falla and the more substantial, but still few ones by Britten and Ponce that are minor compared to ones by Schoenberg, Berg, Stravinsky, Debussy--need I go on?

The situation with ensemble music is even more dire and this underlines the fact that the guitar has never, quite, managed to escape the ghetto it has been in since the 16th century. There is virtually no worthwhile ensemble music with guitar. I know this because I spent much of my career looking for it. There is a small repertoire of duets by Sor and others, largely trivial. There is a small repertoire of music for violin and guitar by Paganini and virtually no-one else. There are quite a few concertos, starting with several by Giuliani, greatly increasing in the 20th century with ones by Rodrigo, Villa-Lobos, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Brouwer, but honestly, any orchestra would much prefer to program ones by Mozart, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff.

The one area in which the guitar stood a bit of a chance was in the repertoire for voice and guitar where we actually have a respectable repertoire, especially if we allow some transcriptions. We have a lot of interesting songs, ayres and chansons from the 16th century by, among others, John Dowland. We have the possibility of some lieder by Franz Schubert, who played and composed on the guitar (there is even a quartet by Schubert based on a trio by Matiegka) and in the 20th century we have song cycles by Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten and others. There is even a chamber opera, El Cimmaron, by Hans Werner Henze for voice, flute, guitar, and percussion. But that's it and especially given the decline in voice recitals, it just isn't enough.

I'm going to be in Salzburg for the festival this year and I am going to see if I can sit down with some people at the Mozarteum and festival administration to talk about the history of the guitar at Salzburg. When I was a student there in the 80s, the guitar had some presence. Pepe Romero taught a month-long master class and he even gave a concert of the Falla Siete Canciones Españoles with, I believe, Teresa Berganza. Originally composed for piano, but workable on guitar. Now, there is no trace of the guitar either at the festival or at the summer courses at the Mozarteum. What happened?

I think it is a question of repertoire. The classical guitar, with the possible exception of the Concierto de Aranjuez of Rodrigo, the Songs from the Chinese of Britten and a couple of solo pieces, simply has no essential repertoire...