Joaquín Rodrigo

Blind from early childhood, Rodrigo wrote his music in Braille and dictated it to a copyist, and the instrument his name is bound to — the guitar — was one he never played. He was born in Sagunto, near Valencia, took his first lessons in that city, and in the late 1920s went to Paris to study with Paul Dukas at the École Normale de Musique, where Manuel de Falla became an advocate; musicology at the Sorbonne followed. He returned to Spain in 1939. The Concierto de Aranjuez, composed that year and first heard in Barcelona in 1940, was written for Regino Sainz de la Maza. Its slow movement takes the inflection of the saeta, the unaccompanied lament sung from balconies as the Seville processions pass. The Fantasía para un gentilhombre, written for Segovia in 1954, turns seventeenth-century Spanish dances into a concerto. He taught music history at the Complutense University in Madrid and received the Prince of Asturias Award in 1996. Pepe Romero linked the slow movement to the loss of Rodrigo's first child and his wife's grave illness. The concerto evokes the gardens at Aranjuez, where the couple had spent their honeymoon, the saeta melody going first to the English horn before the guitar takes it up and ornaments it. He spent part of the Spanish Civil War in Germany, later returning to Paris, and he was ninety-seven when he died in Madrid in 1999.