By Lou Marinoff
If you have listened to Fernando Sor’s “Grand Sonata”, opus 22, brilliantly performed by Ricardo Gallén in Russia in 2016, you already know some things about Fernando: first, that this music is still performed by virtuoso guitarists, and adored by discerning audiences more than two centuries after Fernando composed it, and on stages far from his native Spain. Second, and as we have just heard, Fernando was the first to make the guitar sound like a small orchestra. Third, he exuded an infectious joy and a contagious playfulness from his character and his compositions alike, which won him fans from every walk of life, and in every country in which he played.
In Book One of this trilogy about Fernando’s amazing life and turbulent times, we’ll explore his enchanted childhood in Barcelona and Montserrat, his meteoric rise to celebrity as a young man in Madrid, and his patriotic response to Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Iberia.
Fernando was born in Barcelona, on Saint Valentine’s Day in 1778, the eldest son of middle-class parents. It was a quiet period in a stagnant, yet stable Spain.
Fernando’s father Juan was a deputy superintendent of roads and an amateur guitarist; his mother Isabella, an amateur singer with good social connections. She revealed to her friends that she heard music emanating from Fernando even before his birth. Fernando himself heard music everywhere and in everything, and he would follow it anywhere, and at all hours. And that is how he came to have his fortune told.
At the age of five, Fernando wandered off one day toward the sound of a band of gypsies. Isabella found him perched on a barrel, in a side street off the Plaza Mayor, where the gypsies had halted to play and dance. An elderly and kindly gypsy woman was watching over him, and she declared to Isabella: “He is a special child.” “Yes,” sighed Isabella. “Very special.”
“Maybe even more than you know, Señora. I took the liberty of reading his palm.
“Your son will give the world treasures it never before possessed. He will be regaled by royalty, and adored by the masses. Women will find him irresistible. And how he will travel! Like a wandering star! If I may say so, you are fortunate, Señora, and your child is blessed.”
And indeed, all things she prophesied would come to pass.
Their first inkling of Fernando’s remarkable gifts revealed itself that very summer of 1783, when his parents took him to an Italian Opera called Giulio Sabino, by Giuseppe Sarti. Italian Opera was all the rage, and Barcelona boasted a fine opera house, then as now.
Five-year-old Fernando was transported by the glamour of the Barcelona opera house, the glitter of the audience, the opulence of the production, and the majesty of the music. On their way home, Isabella hummed an aria from the opera, or thought she had. Suddenly, she felt Fernando tugging at her sleeve: “Not like that, Mama, like this,” he said, whereupon he hummed the aria perfectly, note-for-note. When they reached home, he correctly disentangled the harmonies and taught them to his parents.
Fernando not only had perfect auditory memory, but also began accompanying himself on his father’s guitar. It was too large for him to hold in the proper position, so he laid it flat and played it like a dulcimer, or a zither. As word of Fernando’s unusual gifts spread, the Music Director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra offered to give him lessons, and so exposed him to harpsichord, piano, violin, cello, and lute.
When Fernando was only ten, his father Juan died, thus leaving Isabella to wonder how she would manage to provide for him and his younger brother Carlos. But the hand of destiny intervened, as it would – time and again in his charmed life.
For word of Fernando’s gifts had reached the ear of Father Arredondo, Abbott of the legendary Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat, which boasted one of the oldest and finest choir schools in Christendom: the Escolania.
Fernando spent six years at Montserrat, under the sagacious guidance of the Abbott and the loving but disciplined tutelage of Father Anselmo Viola, who taught him solfège, harmony, and counterpoint.
He was exposed to the music of Haydn and Mozart, and became an accomplished pianist, organist, and violinist. Montserrat cultivated all of Fernando’s musical gifts, along with a pure reverence and deep devotion to the spiritual, that would never desert him. Fernando was fortunate indeed that Montserrat evoked in him such deep emotion and profound reverence, in addition to polishing his gifts as a composer and performer.
Fernando graduated from the Escolania at the customary age of sixteen. But unlike most of his classmates, who, on graduation, became choir-masters and music teachers, or who entered holy orders, Fernando’s mother obtained for him a military commission, as a sub-lieutenant in the Army of General Vives headquartered in Villafranca.
This commission was a typical middle-class stepping-stone to a career in the military, or the civil service. But General Vives wanted Fernando to entertain the officers with courtly music, and the troops with bawdy songs and barrack-room ballads. For this was peacetime Spain, and music pervaded all walks of Spanish life, including the army.
Fernando gladly obliged, and in return, General Vives allowed him as much freedom to compose as his heart desired. One day, in the library of the Barcelona Theatre he came across an old libretto for an Italian opera, Il Telemaco. Inspired, he composed a score. To Fernando’s astonishment, both the Manager of the Theatre and the Music Director of the resident Italian troupe were so impressed that they decided to perform the opera!
The overture brims with Fernando’s playful sense of drama and joy alike, luring listeners in with his elegant harmonies and dancing melodic lines, with nods to Haydn and Mozart, and distinctively Spanish touches. He was only seventeen when he wrote it.
Il Telemaco was premiered in August of 1797, and needless to say, it became an instant hit. As Barcelona’s music critics and newspapers lavished praise on the work and its young composer, word of Fernando’s talents spread throughout Catalonia and beyond, to Madrid.
Out of the blue, in 1800, Fernando received an offer he could not refuse: an invitation to be sponsored by none other than Maria Cayetana de Silva, the 13th Duchess of Alba. She was Spain’s wealthiest, most ravishing, and also most notorious Grandee, and at that time, the patron of the immortal painter, Francisco Goya.
So Fernando took up residence in the Duchess’s Liria Palace in Madrid, and found himself vaulted into the circle of Spain’s ruling elite: a circle that promised celebrity, but also harbored danger. For one cannot hobnob with any ruling class, even as a composer, and remain immune from its ceaseless political intrigues.
Goya befriended Fernando, treating him like a younger brother, orienting him to life, art and politics among the elites. For her part, the Duchess gave Fernando every encouragement to compose and perform Spanish music: traditional forms such as the seguidilla and the bolero, and his own ground-breaking concert pieces for solo guitar.
One of Fernando’s sequidillas for guitar and voice is an amusement, comparing women and guitar strings. It illustrates Fernando’s playful nature and somewhat risqué sense of humor.
Let’s meet his typical audience in Madrid’s most exclusive music salons.
First, Goya and his liberal friends:
• Leandro Moratin, then chief librarian for King Charles IV, translator of Shakespeare and Voltaire into Spanish, a poet and playwright who satirized the reactionary rigidity of the ruling classes.
• Gaspar de Javelins, a statesman, author and philosopher who worked for agrarian land reform.
• Ivan Muravyov-Apostol, Tsar Alexander’s Ambassador to Spain, a liberal author who mentioned Fernando in his dispatches to Saint Petersburg.
• José Moñino y Redondo, 1st Count of Floridablanca, a Spanish statesman and Goya’s first noble patron. He had been the reformist chief minister of King Charles III of Spain, and also served briefly under Charles IV. These were core figures of the Spanish Enlightenment.
• Fernando also played for his fellow artists, including Girolamo Crescentini, a famous Italian composer and castrato, who sang soprano and at that time directed the National Theatre in Lisbon.
• His protege was the gifted mezzo-soprano Isabella Angela Colbran, who sang with Fernando and even took singing lessons from him. She later became prima donna of the Neapolitan opera, where she married Rossini.
• There was the virtuoso cellist and composer Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini, who was writing concert pieces for the Marquis de Benavente.
• And there was a young virtuoso guitarist named Dionisio Aguado, who would become Fernando’s lifelong friend and duet partner.
Fernando’s richest and most powerful fans included the Duchess of Alba herself, of course, along with her circle of Grandees: The Duke and Duchess of Osuna, the Duchess of Benavente, and Chief Minister Manuel de Godoy, a man of fine artistic taste, but questionable political judgment. Godoy’s insatiable appetite for power helped unleash a catastrophe that would soon engulf them all.
Meanwhile, to Fernando’s immense credit, he never allowed himself to be corrupted by celebrity or spoiled by adulation. He loved the guitar above all, the instrument that embodied the soul of Spain, and whose heart beat within the very earth of Spain. Fernando remained a man of the people, and so the people loved him.
While his distinguished audience in Madrid was enchanted by his seguidillas and his singing, they were astounded by his concert pieces for solo guitar, such as his Grand Solo.
Moving among Spain’s elites made Fernando painfully aware, soon enough, of just how precarious and slippery were their ostentatious corridors of power. This Goya painting of the Royal Family pleased them no end, because they thought it made them appear simple and unpretentious. Indeed, as French art critic Théophile Gautier scoffed, it looked like the picture of a corner grocer who had just won the lottery. Even so, they gave Goya a handsome bonus for the painting, perhaps because they thought it concealed the scandalous state of their affairs.
King Charles IV lived for one thing above all: hunting. He hunted every day, and the hunt was the centerpiece of his reign. He deemed politics beneath his station as a monarch, and delegated political affairs to Chief Minister Godoy, definitely the elephant in this regal room. But in fact, King Charles was a weakling, with little stomach for power. He was thoroughly domineered by Queen Maria Louisa who, contrary to courtly appearances, wore the pants in the family.
But the Queen herself cared nothing for political power, either. The only power that interested her was commanding the undivided affections of her lover, Chief Minister Godoy. It was she who had connived to make him Chief Minister, as well as Foreign Minister, among many other things. She divided her time arranging honors and titles for him, while scheming incessantly to rid herself of any potential rivals—whether real or imagined—for his rather dubious affections.
Manuel de Godoy himself was an ambitious upstart, from a noble but penniless family of rural hidalgos. A guitarist, gambler, and notorious womanizer, he had joined the Royal Palace Guard and insinuated himself by sheer bravado, soon coming to the Queen’s attention. She fell hopelessly and madly in love with Godoy, and manipulated the King to shower him with power after power.
Godoy relentlessly exploited the Royal Couple to empower him, since he cared primarily about power, and secondarily about art and womanizing. He commissioned Goya to paint a series of nudes —unthinkable in Spain at that time—and so Goya became both the last old master and the first modernist. Godoy also commissioned Fernando, whose popularity drew women like a magnet to every concert, thus expanding Godoy’s horizons for philandering.
While everyone knew about this scandalous ménage à trois, no one in Spain possessed the power or the will to dethrone them. But Napoleon possessed both the power and the will, and would dethrone them soon enough.
The rightful heir to the Spanish crown, namely Charles’s son Ferdinand, is here portrayed by Goya as a benign adolescent. But even then, young Ferdinand VII was consumed by hatreds. He hated his father for being a spineless cuckold. He hated his mother for being Godoy’s shameless trollop. And he hated Godoy for being an audacious imposter.
Meanwhile, the King hated every duty that interfered with hunting, while the Queen hated every woman upon whom Godoy’s amorous gaze lingered longer than a heartbeat. Her greatest hatred was reserved for the Duchess of Alba, who, according to rumor, was having an affair with Godoy.
This recipe for disaster came to a head in August 1802, when news reached Liria Palace that the Duchess had suddenly sickened and died at a wedding feast for her cousin in Sevilla. No one else had fallen ill, and many suspected that she had been poisoned. But to ask “poisoned by whom?” could have been treasonous, so no one did. Fernando was grief-stricken by the Duchess’s demise, and wrote an elegy for her.
Having lost the protection of the late Duchess of Alba, in 1804, Fernando found himself banished from Madrid. He was rusticated to the position of Inspector of the Royal Playing Card Factory near Malaga, on the Costa del Sol. But his banishment turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise, as it brought him into close contact with a remarkable family of Scottish immigrants.
Their patriarch was William Kirkpatrick, a wealthy shipping magnate who had been appointed American Consul by George Washington. History has preserved this letter from William Kirkpatrick to Thomas Jefferson, which accompanied a gift of his finest vintage of old Malaga mountain wine.
William and his Belgian wife Francoise received Fernando as a godsend. They immediately befriended him, and hired him to direct and perform in their seasonal concerts. The Kirkpatrick couple had achieved official status as hidalgos, or Spanish gentry, which meant that their three young daughters would be eligible to marry into the nobility, including Grandees of Spain. And Fernando drew Grandees to concerts like moths to a flame. They also persuaded Fernando to give guitar lessons to their eldest daughter, a feisty nine-year-old named Maria Manuela.
Teaching this young girl became a transformative experience for Fernando. It planted in his mind the seeds of a method for Spanish Guitar that would later become, and to this day remains, the gold standard for beginners on the instrument. His role as a teacher also impelled him to compose studies for his students. Much like Bach’s two- and three-part inventions for keyboard, Sor’s guitar studies are technically invaluable and musically beautiful. They form part of the core repertoire of every student and master alike.
In Fernando’s moving study #17 in E minor, the moderately fast arpeggio produces a sad, lingering melody. The sadness changes to gladness in the E major ending.
Maria Manuela’s destiny proved more magnificent than even her doting parents could have dreamed. Perhaps Fernando sprinkled stardust on her as he taught her, and most likely she had her own supply. At any rate, Maria Manuela grew up to marry the dashing nobleman, Cipriano de Palafox. Their youngest daughter, Eugenie, married none other than Emperor Louis Napoleon III. Fernando could not have known that his first guitar student, in sleepy Malaga, would become the future mother of the last Empress of France.
Meanwhile, in December 1804, France’s First Emperor Napoleon crowned himself in a ceremony at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Many of Europe’s leading intellectuals and artists, who had embraced the ideals of the French Revolution, were incensed at Napoleon’s coronation, none more than Ludwig van Beethoven. He angrily crossed out the dedication of his third symphony, originally called the “Bonaparte” and changed it to the “Eroica.”
For the next ten years, the relentless wars of Emperor Napoleon would devastate Europe as never before, and Fernando, too, would soon enough be swept up by the sanguinary currents of Napoleon’s insatiable ambition.
Napoleon’s personal mission was to conquer as much of the world as he could. He will always represent a paradox to historians and moralists. On the one hand, he settled all his political differences on battlefields, spawning carnage on a scale that would not be surpassed for another century, until World War One. On the other hand, he engendered widespread social and political reforms, implemented secular constitutions, and laid foundations for modernity.
By 1807, Napoleon controlled most of Europe. His only serious rivals were Russia, which he fully intended to invade, and Great Britain, which had access to Iberia via its ally, Portugal. So Napoleon decided to occupy and annex Portugal, along with Spain in the process. With his Western rear secure against British incursion in Iberia, he could turn his undivided attention to invading Russia.
But Napoleon had to ensure that Tsar Alexander would not attack him while he invaded Iberia. So they met in Tilsit in 1807, and drew up a secret treaty. Napoleon granted Alexander a free hand in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, while Alexander granted Napoleon a free hand in Iberia.
Of course, Alexander did not trust Napoleon in the least, but hoped that occupying Spain would prove his undoing. After all, even the mighty Roman legions had come to grief in Hispania. And the Muslim invaders had also been driven out at last, even though the Reconquista had required almost eight centuries. There was something about Spain that was unconquerable.
Undeterred by history, Napoleon inveigled Manuel de Godoy to allow him to march his Grand Armée into Spain, and there join forces with the Spanish army to annex Portugal. Napoleon promised one-third of Portugal to Godoy himself, to rule as his private principality. While Godoy eagerly acceded to this deal, it was only a ruse.
In March 1808, Napoleon summoned King Charles IV, Queen Maria Luisa, their heir Ferdinand VII, and the blindly ambitious Godoy to Bayonne. He bullied both Charles and Ferdinand into abdicating, held them all captive under guard, and installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte as King of Spain.
On the morning of May 2nd, French troops in Madrid were ordered to usher the remaining young prince and princesses of Spain’s Royal family out of their palace and into a carriage, and escort them under guard to Bayonne.
A throng of citizens formed spontaneously to protest, but when the French troops ignored them, they became a mob, and armed with sticks, stones, and knives—tore the troops to pieces. The French garrison sent reinforcements at once, and slaughtered the mob. Thus began the historic uprising of El Dos de Mayo, which spread like wildfire across Spain and Portugal alike. Goya witnessed it, and painted it. He also painted horrific French reprisals against civilian men, women, children, priests, and nuns.
Fernando had returned to Madrid in April, and he, too, witnessed El Dos de Mayo. He began to write patriotic songs, inspiring resistance, which made him more famous than ever, even as far away as England.
In July 2008, the Spanish Army of Andalusia won the battle of Bailen, and recaptured Madrid from King Joseph and Marshall Murat, who retreated northward. Bailen marked the first time that Napoleon’s Grande Armée had ever suffered a defeat in battle, shattering the myth of their invincibility. Spanish troops marched victoriously into the capital in August, singing Fernando’s “Hymn to Victory.” Napoleon flew into a rage and rode into Spain himself, with reinforcements. He recaptured Madrid in December of 1808, and the Junta ordered Spanish troops, including Fernando, to surrender and lay down their arms. But throngs of Madrileños refused, and began to vent their frustrated rage against their fellow citizens: Any Spaniard known to embrace the ideals of the French Revolution, or the reforms of the Enlightenment, was branded an afrancesado: a treasonous Francophile, and a collaborator with the occupiers.
This drove a vicious wedge between Spain’s die-hard reactionaries and her ardent liberal reformers, even if they supported the Church and defended the deposed Bourbon Monarchy, as did Fernando. Madrid crowds that had sung Fernando’s “Hymn to Victory” in August might now tear him to pieces in December.
So Fernando slipped out of the capital and joined a volunteer Spanish regiment forming in Cordoba. He remained a loyal patriot and a Captain in the Spanish Army. He risked his life in battle, even if some of his reactionary compatriots regarded him, and thousands like him, as a traitor for embracing Enlightenment values.
Meanwhile, the British landed an expeditionary force in Portugal, led by Sir Arthur Wellesley, soon to be Duke of Wellington, and Napoleon’s nemesis. He drove the French out of Portugal, and now Napoleon found himself fighting three armed forces in Spain: the British, the Portuguese, and the Spanish.
Napoleon poured army after army into Iberia, and won battle after battle, yet he could not subdue the Spaniards and their allies. At the height of his occupation, there were three hundred thousand French soldiers and a hundred French Generals in Spain, and still it was not enough.
Fernando continued to write patriotic songs, helping spur resistance, such as Los Defensores de la Patria.
But as Spain sank ever-deeper into conflict, Fernando began to realize that not one war, but rather many wars were being waged, all at once. Spanish Generals frequently refused to cooperate with one another, allowing each other’s troops to be beaten separately when they could have prevailed together. They sometimes betrayed their English allies as well, leaving English troops to fight alone instead of joining forces with them. Spanish troops fought bravely, but were often poorly-equipped or badly led.
Some Portuguese soldiers thought nothing of killing and robbing their English allies. The worst of the English conscripts were also criminals— more interested in plundering, looting and pillaging their Spanish hosts than defending them. Wellesley called them “the scum of the earth.” Then again, Wellesley himself planned not only to drive the French from Spain, but also to crush Spanish democracy and reinstate Bourbon autocracy. French troops, too, were out of control: robbing and murdering civilians and priests alike, and raping women on a whim. When capturing a city, French soldiers were sometimes ordered to spare Spanish soldiers and slaughter civilians. Spanish people everywhere paid a terrible price, as they found themselves at the mercy of four armies trying to live off their land, which could barely support even one. Worst of all, perhaps, were roving Spanish bands of looters, thieves, and murderers, posing as guerrilla fighters, but preying on their own army’s baggage wagons, and robbing Spanish villages of their last scraps of food.
Fernando witnessed all this, and Goya drew it in his series “The Disasters of War”. By 1810, Fernando could stomach no more of this pitiless devastation of his homeland. He and uncounted thousands of his compatriots saw only one way to end the conflict: They swore allegiance to King Joseph and his liberal constitution.
But history would rule against them.
Seeing Napoleon hopelessly bogged down in Spain, Tsar Alexander mustered his Russian army, along with his Prussian and Austrian allies, and prepared to March against the French. Napoleon cursed Spain as an “ulcer” and a “cancer”, but had to confront this mounting threat from the East. He took 100,000 of his best troops out of Spain, marshaled yet more French conscripts, and rode eastward to fight Alexander. They clashed in 1812 at the bloody battle of Borodino, where the French won a pyrrhic victory. Alexander retreated ever eastward, burning Moscow behind him.
This campaign was seared so deeply into Russian memory that it would later inspire Tolstoy’s epic, War and Peace, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
Napoleon had to abandon Moscow and return to Paris in the teeth of the Russian winter, for which his formerly Grande Armée was abjectly ill-equipped. Their retreat was a debacle. At the same time, by 1813, the weakened French forces in Spain were decisively defeated, and they, too, retreated in chaos back to France.
As he had planned, Wellington then crushed democracy by installing the tyrant Ferdinand VII on the Spanish throne. Every Spaniard who had supported King Joseph, including Fernando, was now exiled. Thousands of liberal Spaniards—nobles, politicians, priests, businessmen, artists, tradesmen—fled or faced imprisonment. Fernando bade farewell to his beloved mother and brother in Barcelona, eloped with his childhood sweetheart Joaquina, and crossed the border into France.
He left with a song on his lips “¿Adonde Vas, Fernando Incauto?”: Where are You Going, Unwary Fernando?—whose final stanza is a prayer: not for his own sake, but for the unity of Spain.
Thus Fernando went forth to fulfill the gypsy woman’s prophecy of long ago, and his own magnificent destiny yet to come.
Here ends Book One of the trilogy.