Eduardo Fernandez - All Roads Lead to Rome
Each generation has their monumental figures - the ones who are constantly pushing the envelope, showing us the way, and giving us an ideal to strive for. Uruguayan guitarist Eduardo Fernandez has earned such a reputation and has accomplished and contributed an inordinate amount to the classical guitar. He has been on the concert stage for over 50 years, has toured the world many times over, performed in the finest concert halls, and has had the most esteemed composers write new works for him. He has also had a lustrous recording career for Decca Records, Delmark Classics, and Oehms Classics, to name but a few, where he has recorded nearly the entire guitar repertoire.
Fernandez has also been a much sought after teacher inspiring generations of students through masterclasses, his teaching at the University in Montevideo, and now through his research work where he has been contributing to the scholarship of the great nineteenth century guitarists amongst many other subjects.
He has been extremely active as a performer, teacher, composer and scholar no doubt leaving a profound impact on the world of guitar and music.
Eduardo Fernandez recently sat down with us to discuss the guitar, Fernando Sor, Andres Segovia, Manuel Maria Ponce, and so much more.
Eduardo Fernandez
Brad: Maestro, let's just start from the beginning. What is the classical guitar?
Eduardo: Well, it's a guitar that plays classical music. Very simple, and I think that we all know what classical music is, a tradition that begins about the 12th century with the invention of polyphony and goes on to today. Although maybe we should talk about classical guitarists and not classical guitar, because the instrument is the same, whether you play classical, folk, tango or whatever. A curious thing is that we don’t say or refer to Kissin or Zimerman as "classical pianists", they are just pianists. So, why do we need to put this adjective "classical" as if it was not the default setting for the guitar? Perhaps I am just being provocative here, but it is something to think about.
Brad: Is it a hard instrument?
Eduardo: Yeah, I think it is when compared to others. There are so many more things one must do to make it sound, there is much more to do than with other instruments. On a piano, you just press a key, and the sound comes out. On the guitar, we have to produce the sound using both hands, unless you're playing open strings. There is also the question of the fingerings, the guitar can produce the same note in different places, which means we always have many possible fingerings for the same phrase, and this also must be decided upon. So, it's a bit more complex than playing the piano. For instance, with other stringed instruments, they might have the question of bowings and so on, but the music isn’t usually polyphonic, and for the guitar it is very rare that we have only one line of music to play. So, this is just one more of the many complexities.
Brad: I know that in the beginning stages of your development you studied with Guido Santórsola and Abel Carlevaro, I think that Carlevaro was a protege of Villa-Lobos, and this is such an important connection for our music. Can you take us back to that era and share any insights from those relationships?
Eduardo: Well, those two were very different people. Santórsola was basically a composer, conductor, and he was also an established violaist. He played in the orchestra for a long time, then retired from performing and concentrated on teaching and composing. He had a general view of music. I mean, he wasn’t only knowledgeable about South American music, but he knew everything. Carlevaro was a fantastic player, great teacher, and he developed his own school of playing and especially of teaching the guitar. He was also a great musician, but his focus was more on the instrument, and what can you do with it. The colors you can produce, the textures you can produce, and so on, he was able to capture many different things with the instrument. Yes, he had a good relationship with Villa-Lobos, but I wouldn't say a protege, in that sense. I mean, he played for Villa-Lobos, he had manuscripts that Villa-Lobos gave him, of the etudes, almost all of etudes, but I would say it stops there, the connection.
Santórsola, had also met Villa-Lobos, because he was in Brazil for a long time. He was born in 1904 and came to Uruguay around 1941, but before that he had a career in Brazil as a conductor, violist, professor, and he was also composing a lot too which gave him plenty of opportunites to meet with Villa-Lobos.
Brad: Have you ever contemplated being a part of such a lineage?
Eduardo: I do not think there is a linear connection here. Also, the cases of Carlevaro, who worked directly with Villa-Lobos, and Santórsola, who just met him, are very different. I do not think I am part of a "lineage" in that sense, although I have certainly tried to understand Villa-Lobos as best I can. I would be suspicious of any claim of legitimacy of interpretative choices based on "lineage" anyway, if they disregard what is written in the score. I think each interpreter takes an individual way when confronting a score. It isn’t a question of who you studied with, but of your own taste and capacity for researching the context and putting it to work in your interpretation.
On the other hand I did study some works of Carlevaro with him, and in this sense I do have an idea of exactly what he wanted. So in that case, maybe there is some heritage. Question is, did I understand him right? We all think we understand, but transmission is a tricky thing, sometimes it is difficult to differentiate it from digestion and assimilation and translation to one's own terms. But music always goes on.
Brad: What would have been your biggest takeaway from working with Santórsola and Carlevaro?
Eduardo: With Santórsola, I would say that I learned about music in general, to analyze the piece, and to really dig deep to see how the music is made. He also stressed the importance of the expressive dimensions of a piece, and to always strive toward playing my best in every situation. All of which are very practical and extremely useful, of course. With Carlevaro, I basically learned how to do what I wanted to do with the guitar, the instrument, technically speaking. Others who studied with Carlevaro copied him and played just like a second Carlevaro, let's say. I had already been studying with Santórsola, at least two, or three years. So, I had my own ideas of what I wanted to do with the music, and Carlevaro was okay with that.
He suggested to me years later that we had the most interesting conversations during our classes about what to do with this passage or that other passage or tempi or whatever. I would say that it was very good to have worked with both of them. I was studying with the two simultaneous, which can be a challenge because maybe teacher A tells you to do this and teacher B doesn't agree, but it really did work out well for me.
Brad: What was your playing like at this point?
Eduardo: I think I was basically a good amateur. I had no notion of what it truly meant to play music. I might have been addicted, but still an amateur.
Brad: How did you know that this was the life for you?
Eduardo: Well, I think, and I tell my students that you choose music as a career if you can't be happy doing anything else. Really for me, it was like this. I could have gone into another field, but something would be missing. Something very important would be missing.
Brad: When I asked Berta Rojas about you the first thing that she said was; "He's such a hard worker."
Eduardo Fernandez: No, not true at all. Maybe sometimes a student has an impression, but it isn’t the right one. Berta saw me usually only during class, and maybe during the classes I worked very hard, but that doesn't mean that I am a hard worker at all. You do the work you have to do. I actually want to be a very soft worker, to work as little as possible.
Brad: That doesn’t seem possible as a classical guitarist because no matter how hard I work, it's still not enough.
Eduardo: It's never enough. Welcome to the club. The thing is that the more you advance, the more you learn, and the more you become aware of how much more there is. You also discover new things. For instance, I have been, the last maybe 15 years, I went very... I don't want to say deeply but I went back to study the classics of the guitar, reading the methods and trying to work out their techniques and so on. I have learned a lot from this endeavor, and I actually wrote a book about it in Spanish, Inventando la Guitarra. There's always more. First you start with the text which is already hard to play, but to understand the text, you also have to know about the context of the piece, and the performance practices of the time. You must know how fingerings are done in many different possible cases. If a composer was also a guitarist, you need to know how he or she thought about and approached the instrument because they're going to write according to what they do. So, this is one point, but there are so many other things. You have to know what was happening in the music of the time because nobody can escape being influenced by the culture of their time.
Brad: Maestro, what's the best way to come to these understandings?
Eduardo: You have to learn about music in general. If you play a piece by, I don't know, let's go back now. If you play a piece by Milán or Narvaez, you should know that the model for this music was basically vocal music, and choir music. You should know about Josquin des Prez, for instance. You have to know the madrigals of the time so you can approach the piece with all of this in mind, and it's going to be something very different than if you were just putting your finger where the text says it has to go. You must form a conception of the piece, and this has many, many layers. It helps to also read some literature of the time to see how people thought, what they believed in and what was important. You should also know something about the history of the times as well as the other arts, visual arts, for instance, design, and architecture.
Every little bit of knowledge helps to gain this vision. You can never have a total knowledge, but you need to have enough to do something with the piece and understand the spirit in which it was composed.
Eduardo Fernandez teaching a masterclass in La Falda, Argentina
Brad: When you say that you went back to study the classics, do you mean Fernando Sor and Mauro Giuliani?
Eduardo: Yes. I read the methods, but I also tried to see if what they wrote applied in the concert works. Some things, maybe they felt too obvious to mention, remember that these people were inventing the guitar as a concert instrument.
Brad: My study this year has been working through this first edition of Op. 59 by Carcassi.
Eduardo: This is almost second generation. Carcassi was born after, quite after Sor and Giuliani, and he was picking up from the foundation that was already set. Sor and Giuliani are basically contemporaries of Beethoven, more or less, and Carcassi is just a bit later, but enough later to be a bit different.
Brad: The reason I bring it up, it's exactly like you said, he's really figuring the guitar out and what is possible on this instrument.
Eduardo: Yes, because the guitar was not considered a concert instrument. In fact, the guitar with six strings establishes itself, I would say basically in the very last years of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th century. The first method by Aguado, 1825, he mentions that some people still have double strings on the guitar. I think that his first attempt to do a general method of guitar was the Escuela de Guitarra, 1825. When Aguado returned to Spain, he wrote his famous method, Nuevo Método, 1844, and it's already a bit different than his first attempt. Aguado is a special case because Sor and Giuliani were celebrities in the music world at the time, and this idea we have where there is a music world and then there is a guitar world did not exist for them. Giuliani was a celebrity in Vienna at the time of Beethoven. Sor was a celebrity in Paris, where there were many important people around, in London, or in St. Petersburg. So, this separation of guitar music and the rest of the musical world, I think, started with Aguado, which is very funny because it is the only method that really survived and influenced a school of thought. Everybody studied with Aguado until Andres Segovia came along.
Brad: Can you give some insights into Fernando Sor?
Eduardo: Well, in his method, he describes in detail the technique that he uses. The basic points, I would say, he uses presentations that take more than four frets, and he basically used only three fingers on his right hand, and the (a) finger only when he really needed to. When playing the works of Sor you have to keep this in mind to figure out how this works within his pieces.
Brad: When you play Sor, do you use this approach?
Eduardo: Well, I'm not a fanatic, you know, a Taliban. Of course, it helps a lot, you know. It does help a lot, because if you tried to use modern technique, which is Aguado technique really, on the pieces by Sor, there are many things that are going to be very problematic. Today we have this fixed presentation of four frets, four fingers, and that's it. So, there are many things you just cannot resolve this way. Just to give an example, the Etudes of Opus 29, for instance, almost nobody plays them because they are very difficult to reduce to modern technique.
Sor gives specific examples of when you have to use the (a) finger. So, he wasn't a fanatic in that sense, but the idea of the fingering is important. Especially with the left hand too, he had different habits of fingering, for instance, he uses presentations that cover more than four frets and you get these big stretches and awkward voicings. So, if you try to reduce it to "modern" technique, things become a lot more complicated than they should be. Another instance is the way Sor uses ligatures in scales (which are different from Giuliani). I really cannot give you a complete picture without taking an inordinate amount of space, but believe me, left hand use is extremely important not only in Sor but in all of them.
Brad: How does Sor differ from Giuliani?
Eduardo: Well, completely different. You see, Sor was truly polyphonic all the time. Where Giuliani writes more in accompanied melody or in imitation of the orchestra. So, the ideas are very different, and the techniques are also completely different. Giuliani used all four fingers and in a more fixed position than Sor, and the techniques are so different in fact, that Sor has an example in his method where he states that he cannot play this passage according to his principles, and it is a part of a piece by Giuliani.
The famous arrangement he made, I can't remember the name now, but it is a piece by Giuliani. He says, I cannot do this with my principles, so I do this instead. I think that anybody who came from Giuliani's school had a little trouble with Sor because of the extensions. The two were almost incompatible, which is very natural in a way because they were developing their own technique. They were inventing different guitars in a way, which is the title of my book, Inventando la Guitarra.
Eventually these ideas about technique and how to play the guitar started to become more or less homogeneous. This generation disappeared and the next generation went for many different things, more virtuosity, more melody, or what you can say was more guitaristic, but also less musical in a way.
Brad: The late 19th century romantics were less musical?
Eduardo: You can tell just by looking at the scores of Regondi, Coste, and even Mertz sometimes, not all of Mertz, he has some very good works, but sometimes there are many more notes than in a work by Sor or by Giuliani, but a lot less musical content - very little polyphony, often banal melodies, and a preoccupation with virtuosity. There was practically no attempt at a big form and in fact a very primitive handling of musical form, most of the time.
The guitar became very decadent with some exceptions, but basically decadent, it went so far out of the music world that it disappeared from the radar. It didn't disappear. There were always guitarists playing, but this myth that the guitar died and started again with Tarrega, it's not true. There's a constant line from Aguado, to Arcas, to Huerta, to whoever, and then Tarrega appears. The main problem I am getting at is that the guitar had become separated from the world of music.
Brad: If you could only play the music of one, and this is just hypothetical, Sor or Giuliani?
Eduardo: Oh, you want me to choose between the two? No, they are different. They're both very, very good. I won't say just one. I want to play both.
I do think that more of Giuliani’s music needs to be played though, because only a few pieces in his catalog are performed regularly. In Italy they know more pieces by Giuliani, but outside of that country we usually only hear the Grand Overture, or the Handel Variations, which aren’t the best set of variations by Giuliani by any means.
Brad: Why do you think that the finale is so short in the Handel Variations ?
Eduardo: Well, this piece was... I think it's our most industrial piece in a way. They were publishing all the time, but there wasn’t any copyright. He sold the piece to the editor and that's it. The best thing for them was to make sets of variations that amateurs could play and so that they could sell a lot of copies.
You have to differentiate between this kind of thing and when Giuliani was writing for real. Some of the variations are very, very good, also the Rossiniana’s people still play all of them, and maybe the Sonata Eroica is still played, but when I recorded the Giulianate for instance, which for me musically is one of the best things that Giuliani ever did, it was the first complete recording. It's unbelievable. It's like if you have sonatas by Beethoven that weren’t being played.
Eduardo Fernandez
Brad: Maestro, just to change gears, I think it's 1987, your Bach's Lute Suites recording?
Eduardo: Yes, I also made another one in 2001.
Brad: The ornamentation on that album is just incredible, especially in the 1006a suite, the Gavotte en Rondeau. Your embellishments, I don’t think that anyone was playing like this, in such a profound way. Can you take me through that process, what inspired you to do that?
Eduardo: Well, thank you first, but I wasn't the first one. There was a whole movement of early music people. You can't ignore what is happening outside the guitar. So, I don't think it's my merit and there is a lot written about baroque ornamentation and how to do it, where to do it, and where not to do it, and so on. I didn't invent the basic idea at all. I'm just trying to do what the music is asking for, and I didn't try to copy anybody else's ornamentation. I just try to find the places where you can do something, and with the years, I'm doing much less ornamentation than I used to. I still do, of course some, but I've come to the conclusion that Bach doesn't need so much, except in conventional situations. I mean, if you are repeating the theme in the Gavotte en Rondeau five times, you cannot do the same thing five times like a cut and paste. You must do something different, but only in conventional situations. When you have a very slow piece, like a Sarabande, of course you must do something, but there are libraries of literature if you're interested in this subject.
Brad: It feels improvisatory.
Eduardo: Well, it has to feel improvisatory. In fact, I think all music should sound like that. You should not try to do ornaments just because of the ornaments. You have to not only understand why there is an ornament there, but also what the function of the ornament is, and what does it modify from the notes that are written sub-ornaments. This is all so specific and typical for the genre. These movements are dances, there are various tempos and there are certain types of ornamentation which are obligatory. I go back to what I was saying before, you must know the context in which this music was written.
In the moment I was quite happy with this recording, but as time went on I found that I had a lot more to say. I had developed what I think was a deeper vision, a different take on ornamentation, a better knowledge of the dances, and when I had the opportunity to do the Suites again I thought I should do it. A recording is just a photograph of your playing at that specific moment, and you do the best you can, but I really liked the second try of the Lute Suites better.
Brad: What is your process for interpreting a piece?
Eduardo: It depends on the kind of piece it is. If you have already done a million pieces by the same composer, you're likely not going to have many surprises. But let's say, in abstract, you take a new piece, what do you do? First you must try to understand it. If you don't understand what the text is implying, because the text is not music, a score is not music, a score is instructions for making music. So, you have to understand that, and what does it imply?
The general form of the piece, of course, and the expressive intentions of the piece. Once you have an idea of that, you start trying to get the right fingering that will give you the right articulation, that will not force you to do unnatural things, that will help you to do the things you need to do in terms of dynamics, accents, or whatever. You try to decide on the tempo, and then you start practicing the piece. You shouldn’t just sit there and read the piece at first sight trying to do all the fingers that are already printed which might or might not be adequate, and above all, do not listen to YouTube before you get the score.
Brad: I started to play in the 1990’s and things have changed so much since my early days. Everything is on YouTube and recordings like you used to make don't seem as important anymore. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Eduardo: Well, the world has changed. It really has created a lot of problems for young guitarists. For one thing, you have this saturation of new recordings and new streaming's or whatever coming out constantly, which makes it very difficult to separate the good from the mediocre. There is just too much.
This is one point, and the other point is that it seems easier to just watch a hundred videos of the same piece played by who knows, and to believe that by doing this you are learning the piece, which is not the case at all. It used to be that you would study with a teacher for years until you really were sure that this person had nothing more to offer you.
You know this proverb that all roads lead to Rome, but this happens only if you follow the road to the end. If you're constantly changing the roads, you don't get anywhere and you end up just circling around Rome instead of arriving at a destination. I think this is very important and it's almost unthinkable to do this today, but it's also the only way I think.
The consequence of the saturation of information is that you don't really pay any attention because there is just too much. Of course, with social media, they are competing for your attention, and their objective is to get your attention because of publicity and so on. This creates another problem where you have less capacity for concentrating, and from the beginning of time you just can’t learn a new piece unless you're concentrating 100% for a long period.
Brad: There are so many pieces that I feel like you have a strong connection to, but the Ginastera Sonata seems to have been a major work for you.
Eduardo: I try to have this connection with everything I play, of course, but the Ginastera is a native language in many ways for me. I still had to learn how to play it, but I mean that I know the allusions to folk rhythms and so on, but Ginastera is really very clear in the score. If you do what he asks for, it happens, there are no problems. You don't really need to invent anything. Maybe no one reads the preface to the Sonata, but he says exactly what he intends with his movements.
Brad: What did you think when you first started to learn the piece?
Eduardo: Well, I thought that this is a really good piece by an important composer, so let's try to do it well. I also think it's a very effective piece for the audience, even nowadays. I played it a lot and then I moved on to doing something else. I mean, I don't believe in playing the same things for 30 years. Also, you get bored, and when you finally reach the bottom of the piece and you have nothing more to add, then it is time to do something else.
Brad: Your recent programs have included the works of Manuel Maria Ponce and I’ve noticed that the Sonata Mexicana sometimes makes an appearance in your set and other times it is left out.
Eduardo: Well, I have a program with the four Ponce sonatas that I have been performing a lot this last year. The Mexicana I have played a lot, but then I didn't play it anymore, and then I took it up again. I don’t think it's particularly hard, it has its many challenges, maybe the Romantica is more difficult to do, but perhaps I will take it out of the set on occasion for time constraints and so on.
Brad: That piece has a very folklike charm to it.
Eduardo: Yes, Ponce actually draws upon some Mexican songs, and my friends have told me that the main theme of the first movement, for instance, is a Christmas song. I have a feeling that the last movement, there must be some quotes of folk songs too because it really sounds Mexican, but Ponce is very difficult and quite musically demanding.
Brad: Do you think he composed at the piano?
Eduardo: Well, I think there is a great collaboration with Segovia, and he tried to do things that were idiomatic for the guitar, but he didn't always have the option to hear how things work on the guitar.
At that time, no one was teaching how to write for guitar. Maybe nowadays we do, but back then there was only Segovia or Llobet a bit before, and maybe a few others. Basically, they didn't know how to write for the guitar. So, they wrote, and then Segovia did what I call a virtual transcription of the piece, try to adjust it so that it could be played more or less. I don't see any difference between this process and transcription really.
Brad: I’ve heard that there are three versions of the piece.
Eduardo: There must be many because now we have this fashion of going back to the manuscripts and pretending that Segovia did not exist, or that he existed, but he did everything wrong. So, let's go back and do it again. I don't think this is a good idea for two reasons. First, that the process of collaboration ended, finished there, and you have a piece which is a result of that process, which the composer wanted, and that Segovia was satisfied with. This is one point, and the other point is that 90% of the time, or 99% of the time, Segovia was right in the changes, especially with Ponce, because he understood Ponce very well. It was in his register of things, and he understood what Ponce was trying to do.
Brad: Some argue that you shouldn't play Segovia's Ponce Preludes because he changes so much.
Eduardo: I don't know this argument, but you'll have to go case by case to see exactly what he changes, what solutions did he find, is there a better solution for this one? This must be done by some one who really knows what they're doing here, not the first-year student who thinks that he is being more authentic because he's playing the manuscript, it is not so simple, and with other composers, the same thing. Castelnuovo-Tedesco for instance, did not have any idea how to write for guitar. You can see this in the other pieces he wrote that are not a product of collaboration with Segovia.
They are much, much less idiomatic, excellent composer, but he didn't have an idea of how to write for the guitar. Some composers do have an idea how to write for the guitar and do it very well, Benjamin Britten is one. I know the case of a Uruguayan composer Héctor Tosar, he wrote a piece for me, and I didn't have to change anything. It worked perfectly well. Maybe one suggestion I made, but that was it. All of this questioning of Segovia I think is a backlash from the unconditional adoration that people had for Segovia when he was living, and then he died, and all the wars came to him.
Eduardo Fernandez meeting Andres Segovia (1979)
Brad: Maestro, do you have any stories about meeting with Andres Segovia?
Eduardo: I met Segovia for the first time in February 1977, in New York. I had made my debut the week before, and it had caused a bit of a stir, mostly because I was incredibly lucky to have a great review in the New York Times. I had an audition with members of one of the most active concert agencies of the time, and after that I was invited to dinner with Rose Augustine, the string supplier for Segovia and the patron of the series in which I debuted. After my audition she told me to meet her at the Westbury Hotel, where Segovia always stayed in New York, because she had to give him some sets of strings. There I was in the lobby of the Westbury, more or less at the agreed time and they called me from the reception and handed me a phone. It was Rose and she told me: "Segovia wants to hear you." I am sure that you can imagine that at that time, it was something like having an audition with God the Father, and without prior announcement. There were no excuses, I was with the guitar, I had played my concert the previous week and I had just auditioned, I couldn't claim lack of preparation. So the only thing left for me was to ask which room Segovia was in.
He received me with extreme cordiality, and mentioned Montevideo and Carlevaro. He was waiting for his suitcases, he was in a suite, and Emilita, his wife, was somewhere behind. He asked me what program I had done for my New York debut, and I told him; Molinaro, Bach, Scarlatti, Henze and a few other things. "Ah," he told me, "the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, how good. Play the Prelude a bit." I would have preferred a good dental root canal treatment, because I didn't really agree with his interpretations of Bach, but there it was. I started to play, and in the middle of the Prelude they rang the bell, a suitcase arrived, the waiter passed by me, Segovia was talking to Emilita, first about the luggage, and then saying: "Emilita, come listen to this." I continued, thinking that at least it would be something to tell the grandchildren. When I finished, Segovia told me: "It's not bad, but you have to make it more narrative, and faster." I tried again, because someone who takes music seriously enough to listen to and correct a complete stranger simply because he has decided that this stranger is worth correcting, and he’s anxiously waiting for his luggage, you cannot help but obey. The "narrative" comment shook me and my nerves a bit, and it is a comment that I have carried with me since, but we moved on to another piece. "What's this about Henze?" (Drei Tentos). "Play a little." I thought, we're going wrong here, the maestro doesn't like modern things at all, and at that time this work seemed very modern, where today it can be used as an encore. Thirty seconds into the first Tento he told me: "Leave it, he's trying to be modern." I obeyed with relief. Afterwards he said "The next time we meet, and I'm sure we will, I want to listen to the Chaconne. I wanted to avoid any type of collision, and saw that in Bach it was going to be inevitable, and I said "Maestro, that is a work to do when one is forty years old, and I am only 24." Segovia answered: "That's true, but if you want to play it at forty, you better start right now." In the end, in that hypothetical establishment of a future repertoire to play for him, we somehow agreed on Ponce's Variations and Fugue on the Folía de España. It is a tremendous work, which I had never studied in my life, and that I only knew through Carlevaro's magnificent recording.
A year and a half passes, and Segovia visits Montevideo for what would be his last time. It was the middle of the military dictatorship, 1979. I had married my first wife a few months before, and when I knew that Segovia was coming, I started studying the Folías of Ponce. Of course I went to the airport to receive him, he arrived from Buenos Aires. As soon as Segovia sees me, among a cloud of admirers and journalists, he asks, "Did you learn the Folías?" "Yes, Maestro". "Thursday at three at the hotel." Thursday was the day of his concert, and there was no doubt about which hotel it was, the Victoria Plaza, today the Radisson.
On the famous Thursday in question I went to the hotel with my guitar and sheet music. Segovia, who had to play a very important concert that night, to the point that the program was a facsimile handwritten by himself, had no problem dedicating a good amount of time to me, at least two hours. We toured the entire work, exploring hidden corners and discovering an enormous amount of possibilities.
Segovia's ability to generate interpretive ideas was absolutely incredible, I must say, and infectious. We were quite in agreement, and it was a huge pleasure, in addition to the great honor that it was. An honor whose weight is difficult to convey today, where it even seems difficult to say that something which is given is a great honor, since everything is given.
Anyway, I wanted to tell you about that little experience, and if you study the Folías, remember, on your knees.
Brad: Did you ever meet Julian Bream?
Eduardo: I met him a few times. In New York first, and then I saw him very briefly in Buenos Aires when he came there in '79, I think, and then I saw him again in New York, and that's it. I don't have any particular story, but he was a brilliant person, a brilliant musician, very cultured, I mean, you could talk with him about anything you know. One of my idols, I must say.
Brad: How have you stayed inspired for so many years?
Eduardo: Well, I don't think that I have stayed inspired all the time, 24 hours a day. Inspired, I don't know if that is the word, but I would say interested in the music, trying to understand what the music is saying and then trying to make it happen.
Music is inexhaustible. When you think that you have gotten to the bottom of a work, there is always something more, and the greater the work or the composer, the more this applies. It never ends, you keep discovering new things, or going back to things and finding different and more effective approaches. The guitar just happens to be my instrument, and a wonderful instrument it is, for sure.
Eduardo Fernandez performing at the Taiwan International Guitar Festival (2019)
Brad: Not everyone knows that you’re also a composer. Why are these two worlds kept separate?
Eduardo: Good question, and I am not sure that I can answer it, but I have certainly performed my own works in Uruguay, mostly in the concerts at the Núcleo Música Nueva. Abroad, I think I’ve felt that I would be imposing my works on an audience who just want to hear me as an interpreter. So it just developed this way.
Brad: You have many different voices within your compositional style. For instance, your original piece for guitar quartet, Meditation on Sakura. It's very minimalist in character.
Eduardo: I am not sure that I have just one "voice", over the years you change, and also it depends on the idea you want to realize. The plan for this piece was to be very minimalist because I wanted to show a process, and the only way to show a process is to make cartoons, little squares of things, but it's not necessarily what I do all the time. In fact, this piece is the second of a series of three, which I had planned many years ago, and I just finished about two years ago. They are all very different, and if I have an idea, I try to realize it by whatever means necessary. It could be a series, could be repetition, like in Sakura, or could be anything really.
Brad: Do you compose at the guitar or improvise?
Eduardo: Never. Never. I have also written music for many other instruments, not only for guitar, but always with the score, pen and paper, and now, Finale. If you can't imagine how the sounds are going to work, maybe you should do something else, I think.
Brad: The piece that you wrote for Shinichi Fukuda, Astor visits Heitor.
Eduardo: This is a joke, really. Villa-Lobos had this idea that Etude Six was a tango, which is not entirely right, but he thought it was a tango. So, I thought what would happen if I try to make this evident? I superposed this with typical tango gestures and so on, and then it became quite interesting because then I discovered that in Etude 5, the Poco Meno is actually a quotation from Wagner’s Tristan, so let's put Wagner in the picture, and then I thought, well the melody in Etude 7, we could develop this and also make it a tango, and that's the piece really.
Brad: Has writing for other instruments inspired your solo guitar playing?
Eduardo: I have never really considered the guitar as a separate thing from the world of music or from other instruments, and learned this from Sor who has greatly discussed the imitation of orchestral instruments in the guitar. When I write for other instruments I try to keep in mind their characteristics, of course. In the case of the guitar, I already know them, but paradoxically this makes it more difficult to write for the guitar without falling in clichés.
Brad: I have heard you make reference to the guitar ghetto?
Eduardo: The guitar ghetto is this habit we have of listening only to guitar music, ignoring everything else, and this creates a bubble which is not very healthy. Of course, this might happen also, and does happen, with violinists or pianists or singers, but their ghetto is a lot bigger and has connections to music in general that are much more obvious, and they have a long tradition. So, they are not as disconnected from the music planet as guitarists are. Pianists often collaborate with singers, and just about every other instrument, and there is music written for almost every pairing, and guitarists need to get out of the ghetto and join this world too.
Brad: What is the current state of the classical guitar?
Eduardo: One of contradictory tendencies, mostly between those who are in the ghetto and those who are not. There are always ridiculous fashions whom everybody seems to catch like the flu - for two or three years where everybody is playing the same bad pieces at competitions, because somebody won a competition playing them, or everybody is doing staccato on repeated notes, or everybody is doing diminuendo at the end of the phrases whether it is adequate or not, or doing ridiculous rubato. There are also many young players who are on the right path, and it has probably always been like this, a few doing things well and many not so well. The difference is that now we know more about what is happening everywhere and it makes more noise.
Brad: Maestro, just for fun can you give a few words to describe the following?
Eduardo: I will do my best.
Brad: The classical guitar.
Eduardo: Lovely and difficult instrument.
Brad: Fernando Sor.
Eduardo: Polyphonic, orchestrator, supersensitive.
Brad: Mauro Giuliani.
Eduardo: Brilliant, expressive, virtuoso.
Brad: Dionisio Aguado.
Eduardo: Pedagogue, virtuoso
Brad: Luigi Legnani .
Eduardo: Brilliant, original, surprising
Brad: J.K. Mertz.
Eduardo: Romantic, great when inspired.
Brad: Giulio Regondi.
Eduardo: Virtuoso, sometimes inspired, sometimes not.
Brad: Andres Segovia.
Eduardo: Titan, revived the guitar as a concert instrument.
Brad: Julian Bream.
Eduardo: Great musician, brilliant, deep.
Brad: Berta Rojas.
Eduardo: My best student ever.
Brad: Masaki Sakurai.
Eduardo: Great luthier and friend.
Brad: Is there a time period that you wish you would have explored more?
Eduardo: I have spent time with all the eras, and depending on the program that I am currently performing I usually catch myself being more attracted to the one I am not currently doing. Lately I have spent a lot of time with the vihuelists, especially Narváez, I think that it is some of the greatest music we have.
I have studied the vihuelists here and there for nearly 50 years, especially Narváez, then I stopped playing them because I concentrated on other things, and recently I just picked it up again. I truly do think that it is some of the greatest music we have available. The sheer quality of the music, the polyphonic construction and the use of motives are just extraordinary, and the change from vihuela to guitar does not affect the essence of the music, just like playing Bach on a piano does not change the music. I think we should all be playing at least some works from this period, but unfortunately this is not the case.
Brad: You have studied, performed, and recorded the entire guitar repertoire, what have you learned about our instrument?
Eduardo: I don't think there is any lack of repertory, although it is obvious that it cannot be compared to the piano, for instance. But we can put together many interesting programs covering all styles and showing the instrument's possibilities. Performing for an audience and always trying to rediscover the music with them is a fascinating thing for me and something that I really love about my career. The guitar, it speaks quietly but can say very interesting things.
Brad: What words of wisdom can you give to the next generation?
Eduardo: The next generation will make many of their own mistakes without any need for advice from me, but speaking to just the guitarists, I would advise rediscovering the classics, and not just in terms of the guitar.