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Fernando
Sor(1778-1830)
Portrait by J. Goubaud,
engraved by M.N.Bate
Photograph by Roger Viollet, Paris |
Fernando Sor (1778-1839) was born in Spain, fought in the Napoleonic
Wars, then traveled to the major capitals of Europe - Paris,
London, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and St. Petersburg - teaching
the guitar, playing concerts, and composing all sorts of music:
songs, ballet music, piano music, and of course the guitar compositions
for which he is famous. . . . The first thirty-five years of
his life he spent in Spain, where he received his musical education,
established a career and a reputation, and composed many works.
It was a significant period in his life for its length, for
his musical formation, and for his material and artistic achievement
. . . From this period we have an opera, a cantata, a motet,
Spanish patriotic songs, and pieces for solo guitar, as well
as a number of Spanish seguidillas
for voice and guitar or piano which have only recently come
to light. The symphonies and string quartets, which we know
he composed at this time, have unfortunately disappeared. Those
works that survive show a man who was well aware of the Spanish
native tradition and contributed to it above all in his seguidillas,
but who also looked outwards, to Italian opera, to Mozart and
to Haydn. They are confident and talented works, and they show
a character of their own when compared with Sor's later music
composed outside Spain. The early guitar pieces have vigor,
the later ones delicacy; the early seguidillas
clearly stand within a living tradition, while the later
boleros show the disintegration of exile.... Although
Sor never returned to Spain, he retained a strong emotional
attachment for his country all his life, and we may almost assume
from a letter he sent to King Fernando VII of Spain (accompanied
by a manuscript copy of his overture to Hercule
et Omphale) (probably between 1826 and 1828) that
he wished to return. Presumably no reply was sent; none is known,
and Sor remained an exile, living in Paris and mixing more and
more with the Spaniards who lived there. At the end of his life,
it was Spaniards who supported him, were at his side when he
died on July 10, 1839, and provided his tomb in the Cemetery
of Montmartre, where it can be seen today.
(These biographical
notes are compiled, slightly condensed or directly quoted, from
Brian Jeffery's definitive biography, Fernando Sor, Composer
and Guitarist Tecla Editions, Hansen Publications, Inc., Miami
Beach, 1977.)
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