Ferdinando Carulli

Self-taught on the instrument that made his name — Naples offered no guitar school when he turned to it from the cello — Ferdinando Carulli found his public in Paris, where he worked as a performer and teacher. His Méthode complète pour guitare ou lyre, Op. 27, sets out a systematic course of exercises and graded studies. His output includes about four hundred works: solos, duets, chamber music with strings, flute or piano, concertos and operatic variations. With the Parisian maker René Lacôte he developed the décacorde, a ten-string instrument extending the guitar's bass register. He came to the guitar at twenty, having begun on the cello, and published the Méthode in 1810. Around 1801 he married Marie-Josephine Boyer and began composing in Milan before the move to Paris, where he eventually published his own music and that of other guitarists, among them Filippo Gragnani, who dedicated three duets to him, and where he died on 17 February 1841.