Classical Guitar’s Founding Myth: Segovia Was a Modernist, Not a Romantic
This is a summary of a four-part series examining classical guitar’s Modernist origins and the institutional suppression of Narciso Yepes. — Part I: The Lie — Part II: The Machinery — Part III: The Cover-Up — Part IV: The Living Witness (and full reference list) Read the complete essay here.
The Inversion
For decades, classical guitar culture has maintained a fiction: that Andrés Segovia embodied “Spanish Romantic” tradition while Narciso Yepes represented cold, alienating Modernism. The opposite is true. Segovia was a Modernist — not a high Modernist like Boulez, but as much a pioneer of the neoclassical Modernist performance ideology as Stravinsky and Ravel, both born more than a decade before him. Yepes’s performance practice, pedagogy, and musical ethics are precisely what Modernism was designed to suppress.
This is a summary of the evidence expounded in my essay, “Why Do They All Hate Yepes?”
What Modernist Ideology Demanded of Performers
The relevant strand is Stravinskian neoclassical Modernism — the aesthetics Igor Stravinsky articulated in his Poétique musicale (1942/1947) and his 1924 essay on his Octet, which together constitute the theoretical foundation of twentieth-century performance orthodoxy across multiple traditions, including “historically-informed performance” and “classical guitar.”
Stravinsky’s doctrine reduced the performer to an “executant”: someone realising the composer’s supposedly explicit (or at least discoverable) will without introducing personal interpretation. He framed this explicitly as ethical, not aesthetic — the distinction between execution and interpretation was, in his words, “a difference… of an ethical rather than of an aesthetic order” (1947: 123). Performance was not creative dialogue with a work but reproduction of an arbitrarily fixed model.
This doctrine had a specific aesthetic profile. Richard Taruskin, documenting its effects across twentieth-century performance, identifies Modernist practice as “lightweight, hence leery of the profound or the sublime” — text-centred, impersonal, unfriendly to spontaneity (1995: 167). In essence, it was antagonistic to difference — to alterity. Vladimir Jankélévitch identified the inevitable sonic result: “the style plat” — the flat style — produced by prohibitions against sonic depth, dynamic range and nuance, sustained lines, and tempo rubato: “the uniform speed of the machine” (Music and the Ineffable 1961: 45).
This is the ideology against which Segovia’s “classical guitar” movement must be reassessed — and against which Yepes’s institutional marginalisation finally makes sense.
The Smoking Gun: 1947
The classical guitar establishment’s alignment with Stravinskian doctrine was initially explicit. Guitar Review (1947) — whose editorial philosophy was, as Graham Wade documented, “initially based on the maestro’s principles” (1993: 31) — published this about Segovia: he “does not ‘interpret’ music to us — what we hear is the music itself” (Guitar Review 1[4]: 76).
The scare-quoted “interpret” and the claim to deliver “the music itself” are Stravinskian formulas, published the same year as the first English translation of Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music — containing the identical doctrine. But the critical mechanism is more specific than stylistic alignment. By declaring “Segovia is Bach — he is Albéniz … reincarnated”, Guitar Review (1947: 76) elevated Segovia to the level of the Composer himself: he does not merely execute the composer’s will faithfully (allegedly); he incarnates it. This elevation served a precise ideological function. Once Segovia’s performances were declared equivalent to the composer’s authority, other guitarists — students and competitors alike — were subjected to the Stravinskian executant doctrine in its most coercive form: not “replicate the score faithfully” but “replicate Segovia’s performance exactly.” Whether Segovia himself always performed in the style plat is secondary — though he did so in many instances, particularly earlier in his career, before the interpretive workarounds imposed by extreme old age. The ideology was never primarily about how Segovia performed. It was about what others were forbidden to do: to reject his moulds as mere interpretations, like every other performance of music.
Segovia’s Own Words
The Segovia–Ponce Letters (1989) removed all ambiguity. The correspondence documents Segovia’s aesthetico-ideological commitments across decades.
In 1923 he wrote with enthusiasm about Modernist composers including Schoenberg and Wellesz. In January 1928: “Be modern.” In December 1929 he dismissed Turina and Manén as “old-fashioned music.” In September 1930 he called Paganini’s works “of inferior musical quality” — the anti-Romantic contempt of Modernist cultural politics. In September 1932 he praised Falla’s El Retablo for exceeding “the insignificant humanity” of other works on the night’s programme— a direct reference to Ortega y Gasset’s “dehumanisation of art” (1925), the theoretical foundation of Spanish Modernist aesthetics (The Segovia–Ponce Letters 1989: 3, 25, 49, 83, 121).
Segovia admired and knew Ortega y Gasset personally — he admitted as much in a 1976 television interview (A Fondo, TVE) — and the practical consequences are audible in documented testimony. His disciple Oscar Ghiglia confirmed that Segovia “wouldn’t allow the sorrow of… music to come through… Every piece played by Segovia ended up… with a happy ending” (Guitar Review 115: 12). In the same 1976 TVE interview, Segovia recalled that guitars in his youth “repelled” him because the instrument “retained its melancholic timbre.” Elsewhere, he declared the guitar “synonymous with mirth.” (Gavoty 1955: 17) This is Ortega applied: “the modern inspiration — and this is a strange fact indeed — is invariably waggish” (Ortega y Gasset 1925/1968: 47).
Segovia’s Apollonian declaration to Bernard Gavoty clinches the ideological identification: “I am suspicious of Bacchic [i.e., Dionysian] ecstasies” (Gavoty 1955: 17). Taruskin documents that Stravinsky’s self-declared Apollonianism was “explicitly political”: the Classic (Apollo) and the Romantic (Dionysus) “are opposed in Stravinsky’s exposition under the politically charged rubrics of submission and insubordination” (2008: 395). Segovia’s Apollonianism was not mere aesthetic preference; it was ideological allegiance.
The alignment was not just a case of two men independently arriving at similar ideas — there were actual documented personal and professional ties between Segovia’s world and Stravinsky’s. Correspondence between Segovia and Stravinsky is documented through Robert Craft’s withheld letters (Joseph 2001: 240). All of Segovia’s core composers had direct Stravinskian connections or influences: Tansman was Stravinsky’s close friend and biographer (Taruskin 2008: 443); even Moreno Torroba acknowledged the Russian’s influence in correspondence. The stylistic similarities between Stravinsky’s neoclassical period and Segovia-commissioned guitar works of Ponce and Castelnuovo-Tedesco are almost self-evident:
Pedagogical Authoritarianism as Doctrine
Segovia enacted Stravinsky’s recording doctrine as pedagogy. John Williams testified that Segovia “made his students copy his every inflection,” acting “as if there was but one valid transcription, one interpretation and one fingering of anything in the repertoire — and they were his own” (Starling 2012: 101). Leonardo Balada confirmed this as an eyewitness at Segovia’s Santiago de Compostela masterclasses, stating that Segovia “forced all the players of the guitar” to make “the same phrasing as he was doing” (Duffie 1998).
Stravinsky had sought to create a recording archive to prevent what he called “irresponsible interpretations” and eliminate performers’ “notorious liberty” (Autobiography 1936: 101). Segovia substituted himself as the authority: his recordings were the fixed model, not through demonstrable truth, but through institutional enforcement that condemned deviation as moral failure.
A 1960 Compostela incident is paradigmatic. Balada reports: “I attended one of Segovia’s classes, in which John Williams and Narciso Yepes were present. When it was his turn, Narciso played his own version of Bach’s Chaconne [on which he had worked with Nadia Boulanger and George Enescu]. Segovia didn’t like this and was very hard on him.” (Bruzual 2008) Yepes was expelled for interpretive autonomy — the cardinal sin in Modernist pedagogy. The infamous Chapdelaine incident, caught on film near the end of Segovia’s life, confirms this was lifelong pattern, not temperament:
“Spanish Romanticism” Is a Historical Fiction
The counter-label has no scholarly foundation. F. Courtney Tarr documented how non-Spanish commentators habitually misconstrued “a romantic caricature of Spain” based on “little interest in Spain for herself” (1940: 35). Romanticism proper was a predominantly Germanic, Counter-Enlightenment movement lasting roughly 1770–1850. Spain, under the Inquisition (1478–1834), underwent no significant Enlightenment influence and therefore produced no Counter-Enlightenment reaction — i.e., no true Romanticism. The Spanish politician and writer Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1789–1865), a contemporary witness, observed that there was “no Spanish Romanticism, but rather a masquerade in Romantic costumes” (quoted in King 1962: 8). Edmund King established that even this superficial Spanish adoption of ‘Romantic’ garb lasted only from 1834 to 1844 (King 1962: 8), ending 49 years before Segovia was born. King’s diagnosis: the supposed Spanish Romantics of 1834–44 “did not really, in a profound way, go through the spiritual experience behind the Romantic attitudes — they are answering questions that they have not asked” (8).
Segovia was born in 1893: wrong country, wrong epoch. Applying “Spanish Romantic” to him compounds falsification upon falsification: using a scholarly category that a contemporary witness and professional historians identify as superficial to non-existent to describe a figure born half a century after even the “masquerade” version ended.
The term “classical guitar” is itself symptomatic. It only entered common usage around the 1920s — the same decade Stravinsky’s neoclassicism emerged. Before this, it was simply “the guitar” or national variants thereof (the “Spanish guitar,” the “Russian guitar,” etc.). Around the same time, Segovia strategically differentiated himself from traditional guitarists precisely by adopting neoclassical works from Ponce, Tansman, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Stravinskian attitudes towards musical authority. The terminological shift from “guitar” to “classical guitar” was not continuation of tradition but invention of a Modernist category claiming ‘classical’ legitimacy whilst breaking with actual historical practice — structurally identical to Stravinsky’s neoclassicism and the later “historically-informed performance” movement, both of which returned to a past that never was.
Yepes: The Anti-Modernist
Narciso Yepes’s own words and documented practice constitute a sustained rejection of everything Modernist performance ideology demanded.
On notation and fidelity, in Grandes Intérpretes (TVE, 1971): “Notation is no more or less than an indicator. Signs but not music.” And: textual fidelity in early repertoire is a mark of interpretive failure, not virtue — “The more faithful a player is to a sixteenth-century text, the worse interpreter he is.” At his 1961 Wigmore Hall debut, when Segovia’s interpretations were raised, Yepes stated plainly that “it was not necessary for him to listen to a Segovia record and try to copy it” (B.M.G. 58 no. 672 [April 1961]: 207).
On pedagogy, TV-Kammerkonzert (Südwestfunks, 1973): “if I can’t answer your Why?, then what I’ve told you is no good.” And, in teaching: “I consider the most important thing to discover the student’s [musical] personality, to develop it, and not for the student to play like me, but that he plays like himself.” This is the precise inverse of Segovia’s doctrine.
On audiences: Fritz Buss — who studied with Yepes from January 1961 — documents that Yepes explicitly told him his inner feeling on stage was one of “welcoming them into his being”; that performers must “respect” the audience because “they come and spend their time and money to listen to you — you have a responsibility towards them”; that each listener should “leave the concert taking a part of him with them.” In a 1982 Los Angeles Times interview, Yepes stated he played “for the individual there to hear him — concentrating on that one person, on always giving him my undivided attention, my best” (Saltzman 1982: 12). Stravinsky dismissed audiences seeking emotional connection as wanting “a drug” (Autobiography 1936: 163). Segovia’s hagiographers habitually patronised general audiences for appreciating Yepes and not appreciating classical guitar ‘elites’ more or equally. Yepes treated that same performer–listener connection as an ethical obligation.
On the composer–performer relationship, Rodrigo’s 1997 tribute is unambiguous: the Concierto de Aranjuez “took on a new nature” through Yepes’s interpretation, for which the composer credits the success of the concerto; their work was “an intense collaboration,” travelling “our musical trajectories side-by-side”; Yepes was “my guitarist par excellence. My guitarist” (Rodrigo 1997: 48). Three elements demolish Modernist doctrine simultaneously: the composer credits the performer with positively transforming the work; he frames the music as jointly owned; he identifies a personal artistic bond irreducible to interchangeable execution. Stravinsky had held that interpretation “risks the complete loss of meaning.” Rodrigo’s tribute says the opposite.
The composers Yepes championed confirm the alignment. By way of example, Maurice Ohana was systematically excluded from Boulez’s Domaine musical for opposing serialism, and marginalised by BBC programming throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Rae 2000: 22, 27). Ohana had co-founded the Groupe Zodiaque in 1947 explicitly to defend “freedom of musical expression from what they considered to be the tyranny of serialism” (Rae 2000: 24). The institutional enforcement was explicit: “In the 1960s, not to be serialist was like having some shameful disease” (Marius Constant, quoted in Rae 2000: 27). Yepes championed composers marginalised by the same Modernist establishment that marginalised him — composers who valued creative risk and expressive freedom over systematic control.
Spectrogram analysis confirms the acoustic dimension: Yepes’s tone shows energy concentrated in fundamental frequencies (c. 100–500 Hz) with continuous horizontal banding indicating sustain and legato phrasing. Segovia’s shows weaker fundamental energy (i.e., a brighter, lightweight sound) with fragmented phrase structure — vertical gaps marking staccato articulation. Taruskin’s characterisation of Modernist performance as “lightweight, hence leery of the profound or the sublime” (1995: 167) has a spectrographically measurable analogue:
This spectral distinction, moreover, explains why Narciso Yepes was lauded by neutral, professional critics for his singular ability (as a guitarist) to “fill[] the hall with sound” (Eckert 1982) and project “beautifully” even in venues with “notoriously weak acoustics” (Saffle 1973: 6) — a fundamental level of mastery unattained by Segovia or his descendants within the classical-guitar establishment. (See my article “Bright ≠ Projection ≠ Loud: What Actually Makes a Classical Guitar Project.”)
A Note on Yepes and Romanticism
This must be stated explicitly: Yepes was not a Romantic either. That would be as absurd as calling Segovia one. Romanticism as a philosophical and artistic movement ended decades before either man was born — in the wrong culture.
The argument is comparative and ideological: Yepes’s performance practice, pedagogy, and musical ethics align with what Romanticism valued and Modernism/Segovia explicitly suppressed. When Isaiah Berlin identifies the Romantic concept of depth as “inexhaustibility” — meaning that any description of a profound work opens further vistas, always demanding “three dots at the end” (The Roots of Romanticism 1999: 117) — Yepes’s declaration that “Music does not begin or end. Music is” (Ser instrumento 1989: 18) resonates directly. When the Romantics held that pure copying — as demanded by both Segovia and Stravinsky — was death to artistic meaning (Berlin 1999: 98), they articulated the principle Yepes enacted when he refused to reproduce Segovia’s recordings and demanded that each student develop their own musical identity.
Segovia’s Modernism exemplifies what the Romantics opposed: the belief that musical truth can be fixed, reproduced, and owned; that performance is execution of explicit instructions or reproduction of already extant phenomena rather than creative engagement with inexhaustible meaning. When Guitar Review declared (following Segovian principles) that “Segovia is Bach” — presenting “the music itself” (allegedly) without interpretation — they claimed to have seized what true Romantics insisted cannot be seized. When Segovia demanded students copy “his every inflection,” he imposed the “form” that Romantic principles identified as death to artistic meaning.
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One approach assumes music is inexhaustible. The other claims to have exhausted it.
The Laundering Operation: Wade, 1991
The “Spanish Romantic” myth did not emerge organically from Segovia’s practice. It was manufactured, with identifiable authorship and timing. The primary document is Graham Wade’s article “Segovia and the Spanish Character” (Classical Guitar 10, no. 1, September 1991).
The timing is critical. The Segovia–Ponce Letters had been published in 1989. Wade had access to the documentary record of Segovia’s Modernist commitments — the letters praising Schoenberg, dismissing composers as “old-fashioned,” commanding that works written for him must “be modern,” invoking Ortega y Gasset’s “dehumanisation of art,” and documenting political alignment with Franco’s regime. Yet Wade’s 1991 article addresses none of this. Instead, it pursues systematic historical revision.
Wade’s method: cite generalisations about so-called “Spanish character” from Fernando Díaz-Plaja’s The Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins (1971) — a popularising work the Spanish Royal Academy of History characterises as producing “anecdotes and general cultural observation” rather than rigorous analysis — then claim Segovia embodied these traits, therefore Segovia was “Romantic.” The central claim: “Segovia’s guitar is the epitome of the soloist as romantic image” (Wade 1991: 38).
Wade quotes Díaz-Plaja on the Spanish ‘Romantic’ character invoking “the admiration for the rebel… the praise of whoever lets himself be moved by passion rather than reason” (Díaz-Plaja 1971: 48f; Wade 1991: 38). The ellipsis marks where Wade excised Díaz-Plaja’s actual examples of Spanish ‘Romantic’ rebels: Don Juan, the pirate, the “generous bandit” who robs the rich, figures celebrating defiance of authority and Government. None of these describes Segovia, who had explicitly committed himself to “the continuing traditions of Country, Religion and Authority” (The Segovia–Ponce Letters 1989: 167) and whose pedagogical method was built on unconditional submission. In his own 1974 polemic against Yepes’s 10-string guitar, Segovia condemned rebelliousness directly, warning that “no young artist should dare to introduce capricious changes in his instrument without the blessing of his elders in knowledge and guidance” (Guitar Review 39 [1974]: n.p.). The excision was not editorial economy. It was suppression of evidence that made Wade’s sophomoric argument impossible.
The falsifications compound. Wade asserted that “Segovia expressed few overtly political or religious beliefs” and “remained aloof from political dogma of all kinds” (1991: 36). The Segovia–Ponce Letters, published two years earlier, already document the opposite: explicit support for Franco’s regime, performances in Nazi Germany, anti-Semitism, and extensive political commentary (The Segovia–Ponce Letters 1989: 168, 174, 243). Segovia himself had written: “here [in America] I avoid imprudent declarations. I help Franco with what I can, ostensibly in Europe but behind the scenes in this country” (168). Wade also claimed Segovia “did not go in for either great philosophical statements or for intellectual arguments” (1991: 36) — directly contradicting his own characterisation in Traditions of the Classical Guitar (1980), where Segovia and Williams were positioned as supposedly profound intellects. The reversal was strategic: if Segovia wasn’t an intellectual, readers would not expect rigorous analysis of his documented aesthetico-ideological commitments.
Most revealing is Wade’s characterisation of Segovia as embodying Spanish resistance to “collectivism” and “all that might curb individuality” (1991: 38), written without any mention of Segovia’s systematic suppression of individuality in students and competitors — his demand that they copy his every inflection, his expulsion of Yepes and others for interpretive autonomy, his decades-long pattern of pedagogical authoritarianism documented by Williams, Balada, and others. The figure celebrated as champion of “individualism” was, in documented practice, its most efficient suppressor.
D. L. Shaw, writing about the problematic topic of “Spanish Romanticism” and nineteenth-century Spanish literary revisionism, identified the exact mechanism Wade deployed: critics “attempt to drag [orthodox voices] willy-nilly into the fold by ignoring or suppressing part of the evidence” (1963: 191). Wade enacted this textbook suppression in 1991, two years after the Segovia–Ponce Letters had made that suppression necessary. This was not honest reevaluation. It was damage control masquerading as scholarship. Its insidious effect on the benighted culture of the classical guitar persists to this day.
Conclusion
“Classical guitar” culture was not built on Spanish tradition or Romantic expression. It was built on 1920s Modernist ideology — textual literalism, impersonal execution, copying of purportedly “proper” moulds, aesthetic “lightness,” contempt for audience emotion — that has systematically obscured its origins through historical revisionism.
The evidence for Segovia’s Modernism is primary, documentary, and abundant: his own letters, his composers’ Stravinskian networks, his Apollonian declarations, his Ortegan aesthetics, his pedagogical authoritarianism, and the acoustic properties of his tone. The “Spanish Romantic” label has no basis in Romantic historiography. It was manufactured with identifiable method by identifiable agents — most explicitly in Graham Wade’s 1991 laundering operation in Classical Guitar magazine, executed with full knowledge of the documentary record he chose to suppress.
Narciso Yepes was the casualty: marginalised not for musical inadequacy but for embodying precisely what Modernism cannot tolerate — interpretive autonomy, tonal depth, audience connection, collaborative creation, and the refusal to treat musical meaning as exhausted. Two non-guitarist critics said it plainly. Thor Eckert Jr., in The Christian Science Monitor (17 November 1982), reported that Yepes filled Carnegie Hall with sound: “One left his recital stimulated and elated, with nary a thought as to the potential limitations of the instrument, dynamically or musically.” Michael Saffle, in The Stanford Daily (6 November 1973), noted that guitarists, upon hearing Yepes, left “playfully threatening to throw their own instruments away.”
But Yepes was not the only casualty. The instrument itself was diminished: its acoustic and expressive potential — the dark, projecting, resonant sound Yepes demonstrated could fill Carnegie Hall with enthusiastic listeners, without amplification — was suppressed in favour of the Modernist style plat, and a pedagogical culture was built around the resulting tonal limitations, teaching successive generations to mistake those limitations for ideals. The classical guitar culture that emerged from this process has been ideologically confused and benighted ever since: trained to pursue brightness as ‘projection,’ submission as authenticity, and imitation as artistry — and to regard the documented counter-evidence as heresy rather than history.
The truth is documented. The lie is institutional. And the evidence has always been there.
This is a summary of a four-part series examining classical guitar’s Modernist origins and the institutional suppression of Narciso Yepes. — Part I: The Lie — Part II: The Machinery — Part III: The Cover-Up — Part IV: The Living Witness (and full reference list) Read the complete essay here.
Primary Sources
- Guitar Review 1, no. 4 (1947): 76
- Andrés Segovia, The Segovia–Ponce Letters (1989): 3, 25, 49, 83, 121, 167, 168, 174, 243
- Andrés Segovia, “More Strings?,” Guitar Review 39 (1974)
- Andrés Segovia, A Fondo (TVE, 1976)
- Bernard Gavoty, Andrés Segovia (1955): 17
- Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music (1947): 123
- Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (1936): 101, 163
- Narciso Yepes, Grandes Intérpretes (TVE, 1971)
- Narciso Yepes, TV-Kammerkonzert (Südwestfunks, 1973)
- Narciso Yepes, Ser instrumento (1989): 18
- Joaquín Rodrigo, “Mi guitarrista,” El Mundo (4 May 1997): 48
- Salvatore Cosentino, “Fundamentally Sound: A Talk with Oscar Ghiglia,” Guitar Review 115 (1999): 12
- Joe Saltzman, “Narciso Yepes: Life, Music Hung by a 10-String Guitar,” The Los Angeles Times (22 October 1982): 12
- William Starling, Strings Attached: The Life & Music of John Williams (2012): 101
- Alejandro Bruzual, “Entrevista a Leonardo Balada” (2008)
- Bruce Duffie, “Composer Leonardo Balada: A Conversation” (1998)
- Ivor Mairants, “Narciso Yepes,” B.M.G. 58, no. 672 (April 1961): 207
- Graham Wade, “Segovia and the Spanish Character,” Classical Guitar 10, no. 1 (September 1991): 36, 38
Secondary Sources
- Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (1999): 98, 117
- Fernando Díaz-Plaja, The Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins (1971): 48f
- Thor Eckert Jr., “Opera at Carnegie Hall?,” The Christian Science Monitor (17 November 1982)
- Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable (1961/1983): 45
- Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky Inside Out (2001): 240
- Edmund L. King, “What Is Spanish Romanticism?,” Studies in Romanticism 2, no. 1 (1962): 8
- José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (1925/1968): 47
- Caroline Rae, “Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana: Victims of an Exclusion Zone?,” Tempo 212 (2000): 22–28
- Michael Saffle, “Yepes Delights Guitar Aficionados,” The Stanford Daily (6 November 1973): 6
- D. L. Shaw, “Towards the Understanding of Spanish Romanticism,” The Modern Language Review 58, no. 2 (1963): 191
- F. Courtney Tarr, “Romanticism in Spain,” PMLA 55, no. 1 (1940): 35
- Richard Taruskin, Text & Act: Essays on Music and Performance (1995): 167
- Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music: And Other Anti-Utopian Essays (2008): 395, 443
- Graham Wade, Traditions of the Classical Guitar (1980)
- Graham Wade, “Segovia — A Centenary Celebration: Part III,” Classical Guitar 11, no. 8 (April 1993): 31
