The composer who made guitar a concert instrument never mastered playing it
Joaquín Rodrigo lost his sight to diphtheria at three, composed in Braille, and wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez, perhaps the most famous guitar concerto ever. Yet he never learned to play the guitar well. Late in life he and his wife revealed the haunting slow movement was a response to losing their first child.
Rodrigo was born in Sagunto, in the province of Valencia, in 1901. Blind from early childhood, he began studying solfège, piano and violin at eight and harmony and composition at 16, writing his scores in Braille for others to transcribe. He trained in Valencia and then in Paris under Paul Dukas at the École Normale de Musique, later returning to Paris for musicology. His first works were published in 1923, and from 1947 he taught music history at Complutense University in Madrid, holding a chair named after Manuel de Falla.
In Paris he met the Turkish-born pianist Victoria Kamhi, and they married in 1933; she later wrote a memoir of their life together. The Concierto de Aranjuez was composed in Paris in 1939 for guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza. Its central adagio, in which the guitar converses with the cor anglais, is among the most recognisable music of the twentieth century. Gil Evans arranged it for Miles Davis's 1960 album Sketches of Spain, Rodrigo himself recast the concerto for harp at Nicanor Zabaleta's request, and jazz guitarist Jim Hall recorded his own version in 1975.
Success brought commissions from star soloists. Andrés Segovia requested the Fantasía para un gentilhombre in 1954, a piece now often recorded alongside Aranjuez as his most celebrated pair. He wrote a cello concerto for Julian Lloyd Webber, a flute concerto for James Galway, and the Concierto Andaluz for Celedonio Romero and his three sons, one guitar each.
Honours piled up late. Spain gave him its national prize for composition in 1983, and on 30 December 1991 King Juan Carlos I made him Marquess of the Gardens of Aranjuez. He won the Prince of Asturias Award in 1996 and a French arts order in 1998. He died in Madrid in 1999 aged 97, two years after Victoria; their daughter Cecilia inherited the title, and the couple lie together in Aranjuez.
Source: Joaquín Rodrigo
