European Guitar of the Twentieth Century

The five works gathered here trace the European guitar through changing time, form and sonority. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco draws several centuries of dance and variation into a historical panorama. Ernst Krenek subjects the inherited suite to twelve-note organisation. Benjamin Britten turns an Elizabethan song into reflections whose source appears only at the end.

Michele dall’Ongaro transforms personal remembrance into colour, resonance and ceremonial motion.

Rolf Riehm makes the guitar the bearer of a political meditation on death and the right to mourn.

Variations à travers les siècles op. 71 was Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s first composition for guitar. Written in 1932 and dedicated to Andrés Segovia, it began a collaboration central to the composer’s engagement with the instrument. Segovia also helped to prepare the score for publication. Castelnuovo-Tedesco reported in January 1933 that the copy sent to Schott reproduced a manuscript already supplied with Segovia’s fingering. The printed text thus preserves a practical dialogue between compositional design and instrumental realisation. The title announces a journey through historical styles. A Chaconne establishes the generative ground in D minor, using a concise theme whose cells remain active throughout the work. The Prelude renews this material through continuous motion and triplet figuration. Two Walzer shift the focus towards the nineteenth century, bringing the theme into a lighter metric and harmonic world and opening the sonority towards D major. The final Fox-Trot reaches the urban present of the 1930s through syncopation and a freer, more expansive design. Stylistic contrast and motivic continuity govern the sequence. Baroque form, Romantic dance and modern social rhythm become different states of the same musical substance. Tonality remains the principal field of reference, while chromatic alteration, modal inflection and rhythmic transformation continually revise its expressive meaning. In this historically alert conception of variation, inherited genres act as agents of composition.

Krenek’s Suite für Gitarre allein op. 164 belongs to his mature American period and to the renewed serial discipline that occupied him in 1957. Composed for Theodore Norman on a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation, it received its earliest documented performance from Judith Hosler at Tanglewood in July 1958. Its five movements, Allegro moderato, Andante sostenuto, Allegretto, Larghetto and Allegro, retain the concise succession and differentiated characters associated with the classical suite. Their internal organisation is governed by a single twelve-note serie. The serie is built largely from alternating major and minor seconds, with perfect and diminished fourths marking points of articulation. Linear motion and harmonic friction therefore arise from the same intervallic source. Krenek restricts his serial operations with striking economy. The first three movements use the prime form, the fourth is confined to the inversion, and the finale brings prime and inversion together with retrograde and retrograde-inversional segments. Systematic transposition plays no part in the plan. Each movement gains identity through register, rhythm, density and the chosen state of the row. The historical title and the serial method reinforce one another. The suite provides a framework for contrast and return, while the row supplies harmonic coherence. Krenek treats the guitar as a field of sharply defined lines, isolated attacks and resonant intervals whose spacing clarifies the serial design.

Britten’s Nocturnal after John Dowland: Reflections on ‘Come, Heavy Sleep’ op. 70 emerged from his long association with Julian Bream. They met in 1952, and Songs from the Chinese for tenor and guitar gave Britten direct experience of Bream’s musicianship before the solo work. Written for Bream and edited with his practical knowledge, the Nocturnal received its première from him at the Aldeburgh Festival on 12 June 1964. It also became the first score issued by Faber Music. Dowland’s Come, Heavy Sleep provides the source. Britten reverses the conventional order of theme and variations. The song remains concealed while its intervals, rhythms, gestures and affective implications pass through a sequence of independent reflections. Each section occupies a distinct psychological and musical state, from stillness and suspended resonance to agitation, declamation and march-like insistence. Their succession intensifies the listener’s awareness of an absent original. A passacaglia near the end gathers the preceding fragments around an ostinato bass. Its stability is progressively disturbed, preparing the final arrival of Dowland’s song and the retrospective clarification of the entire structure. The harmonic language gains force from this delayed disclosure. Chromatic lines, focal pitches and open-string resonances suggest relationships whose historical identity remains latent. When Dowland’s melody appears, its modal and tonal profile casts the earlier music as memories, distortions and anticipations. Britten had explored a comparable reverse-variation procedure in Lachrymae, also derived from Dowland. In the Nocturnal, the source text’s imagery of sleep, melancholy and death shapes the work’s expressive world. The contemporary response to the première recognised its analytical imagination and concentration on Dowland’s musical substance. Its later position in the repertory rests on the fusion of large-scale formal control with an exact understanding of articulation, decay and silence. The origins of dall’Ongaro’s Céladon lie in a personal memory of Oscar Ghiglia. The composer first met him in 1983 at Monteflavioinconcerto, an adventurous festival held for a single summer in a hill town near Rome. A circus tent was made acoustically viable by a shell formerly used in the Piazza del Duomo at Spoleto. The programme included the first modern performance of Ezra Pound’s one-act opera Le Testament, composed with assistance from George Antheil, and a memorable recital by Ghiglia. Evenings continued in a local trattoria over fettuccine, mutton and generous jugs of local wine, circumstances in which friendships deepened and future projects took shape. Those memories returned when Giovanni Puddu, with Nicola Sani’s involvement, invited dall’Ongaro to write a short work in Ghiglia’s memory for the Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Dedicated to Puddu and first performed by him at Palazzo Chigi Saracini in August 2024, the score is an intense miniature populated by signals of absence. Bell-like touches, distant chords and half-emerging recollections unfold within a symbolic funeral procession. Dall’Ongaro calls the piece a small symphonic poem, a description that points to its compressed dramatic trajectory and layered instrumental colour. The title refers to celadon, a ceramic colour in which grey-green is touched by delicate blue. This mixture defines the work’s emotional climate. Tranquillity, natural balance and sober elegance surround its memorial gestures. The guitar is gradually set into vibration, as though a passing touch awakened strings already charged with recollection. Resonance becomes the principal carrier of form. Sounds appear, recede and return at a distance; bell sonorities punctuate the processional motion; chords gain expressive weight through spacing and decay. The six-minute span holds private memory, public homage and colour in close equilibrium. Its connection with Ghiglia is embodied in the clarity of its gestures and in the continuity it creates between a remembered artist, the Chigiana tradition and a new work written for the present. Riehm’s Notturno für die trauerlos Sterbenden arose from the political and moral crisis surrounding the deaths of the Stammheim prisoners in 1977. Its title may be understood as ‘Nocturne for those who die without being mourned’ . Riehm responded to a public climate in which the dead could be denied dignity and the rituals of grief. He conceived the work as an act of remembrance and a protest against the erosion of the human capacity to mourn. In a later letter he described it as a small yet important piece whose political meaning lay in its defence of a dignified life and death. The music’s reflective character is integral to that purpose. The choice of guitar carries a specific historical charge. For Riehm it possessed an intimate, vulnerable voice and recalled the protest songs and participatory musical culture of the generation of 1968. These associations enter the work through a language focused on attack, resonance and the border between pitched sound and noise. Conventional plucking is combined with golpé, transverse strokes and bi-tonal tapping. Percussive gestures articulate breaks in the line, while sustained resonances preserve traces of vanished sounds. The title Notturno frames the material as nocturnal reflection, redirecting the genre’s inward character towards shared political grief. Michael Koch-Mattheis gave the earliest performance documented in the composer’s catalogue in Frankfurt in February 1978. Across the programme the guitar links different perspectives: Castelnuovo-Tedesco allows a theme to travel through inherited genres; Krenek gives the suite a serial grammar; Britten reconstructs Dowland from dispersed reflections; dall’Ongaro makes remembrance audible through colour and resonance; Riehm joins mourning to the ethical memory of a political generation. Each work builds its own conception of time from those elements. The past appears as style, formal archetype, hidden song, personal recollection and unresolved history, and every score turns that inheritance into a distinct present tense.

Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026