Henri Tomasi's Guitar Concerto and the Memory of F.G. Lorca

In the summer of 1966, the celebrated guitar duo Ida Presti and Alexandre Lagoya approached the French composer Henri Tomasi (1901-1971) with an unusual commission: a concerto for two guitars. What they could not have anticipated was that the work they set in motion would become one of the most singular and most neglected guitar concertos of the XX° century: a psycho-musical portrait of the final hours of Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), the Spanish poet executed by Francoist forces.

A Work Born Twice

The Concerto's origins reach back further than 1966. Tomasi had long been haunted by Lorca's Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding), a drama of passion and fate set in the Andalusian countryside. He had gathered a wealth of musical themes inspired by the play — but when he sought permission to set it to music, the request was denied. Those themes sat dormant, waiting.

When Presti and Lagoya came to him, Tomasi saw the opportunity to breathe new life into that accumulated material. He gave it a new purpose: to evoke, with intense psychological precision, the last days of Lorca's life in prison — his memories flooding back in fragments, his childhood, his loves, his despair, and finally the horror of the execution. The Concerto was scheduled to premiere on June 18, 1967, at the Strasbourg Festival, under the baton of Charles Munch.

Then tragedy struck. Ida Presti died suddenly in April 1967 during an American tour, of complications from lung cancer. The premiere was cancelled. At Lagoya's request, Tomasi rewrote the entire Concerto, this time for a single guitar. From the ashes of the original double commission, a new work emerged.

Tomasi's Words: The Programme

On the first page of his manuscript, Tomasi attached a handwritten text explaining the Concerto's meaning. It is worth reading in full, as it serves as the key to the entire work:

This programme is not decorative. It governs every structural and expressive decision of the Concerto. The work is not a tribute written at a comfortable distance from its subject, it is an attempt to inhabit the inner world of a man awaiting death, to reconstruct from within the texture of his final consciousness.

The Guitar as the Poet's Voice

The choice of the guitar as the solo instrument is far from accidental. In the history of Spanish culture, the guitar occupies a position comparable to what opera holds in Italy or jazz in the United States — it is the national emblem of artistic identity. From the vihuelists of the sixteenth century through the great Romantic guitarist-composers of the nineteenth, to Andrés Segovia's dominant influence in the twentieth, the guitar had become inseparably linked to Spain's cultural self-image.

Tomasi was acutely aware of this. By assigning the solo part to a guitar, he was not making an instrumental choice, he was making a symbolic one. The guitar is Lorca. Its voice is his voice: lyrical, introspective, capable of extreme tenderness and equally extreme anguish. The orchestra, by contrast, represents the hostile world bearing down on him — the violence of history, the indifference of power.

Across his catalogue, Tomasi used the guitar in three distinct ways, corresponding roughly to three phases of his creative life:

Lorca's Last Poems: The Inner Landscape

To understand the emotional world of the concerto, Tomasi drew on Lorca's final collection, the Sonetos del amor oscuro (Sonnets of Dark Love), written in 1936 and published in the midst of the Civil War, just weeks before his death. These poems oscillate between love and death, exaltation and despair — they are the emotional map of a consciousness pushed to its limits:

These poems give the Concerto its emotional coordinates: the urgency, the sensory intensity, the coexistence of beauty and annihilation.

A Concerto Against the Current

To appreciate how radical Tomasi's Concerto is, one must understand the aesthetic context in which it appeared. The dominant guitar concertos of the mid-twentieth century — above all those of Joaquín Rodrigo, whose Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) had become a global sensation — were steeped in a nostalgic Spanish nationalism: Phrygian modes, Andalusian cadences, popular rhythms and dances, castanets. This aesthetic colonised the repertoire well beyond Spain, shaping works by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Moreno-Torroba, and Manuel Ponce, among others.

Tomasi refused all of this. Despite choosing a Spanish subject (the death of a Spanish poet on Spanish soil) he avoided every ease of Hispanicism and folklore. Instead, he turned to an expressionist language: polytonal harmony (two or more keys sounding simultaneously), antiphony (the ancient technique of call-and-response between opposing forces), and a structural form closer to cinematic montage than to the traditional sonata. The Concerto's three movements do not follow the expected fast-slow-fast logic — they unfold as a sequence of psychological flashbacks, fragments of memory, bursts of anguish and tenderness, assembled with the logic of a film editor.

In certain passages, the orchestral texture evokes, paradoxically, not Spain but the Arab world — through the use of diminished scales that suggest microtonal inflections, a palette that resonates with the deep historical connections between Andalusian culture and its Arab heritage. Tomasi seems to be gesturing, consciously or not, at the deeper roots of both Lorca's world and the guitar itself — an instrument whose name derives from the Arabic qîtâra.

"The guitar intones a kind of permanent improvisation of admirable melodic richness — one can imagine that it represents Lorca himself, his song from the depths, while the orchestra translates the hostile universe that finally claimed him."

Antoine Goléa, Musical, Paris, November 1969

Why Was It Forgotten?

All the conditions for success were present: a composer at the height of his powers, a world-famous soloist, an original and powerful subject, a vigorous and innovative score. And yet, by the time Lagoya died in 1999, the Concerto had been performed barely thirty times in total. Today, it remains almost entirely absent from the active repertoire.

Three factors conspired to produce this unjust obscurity. First, Lagoya himself: Tomasi granted him lifetime exclusivity over the work, which discouraged any other guitarist from programming it — and Lagoya's own career slowed considerably in the years immediately after the premiere. Second, the publisher Alphonse Leduc never released the full orchestral score; only a manuscript copy was ever available for hire, and when digitisation finally occurred in 2013, no plans for public publication followed. Third, the guitar part itself: shaped around Lagoya's exceptional and idiosyncratic technique, the solo writing is simultaneously demanding and unusual, without the technical rewards that attract performers to showpiece concertos.

On May 14, 2011, 42 years after the Premiere, guitarist Emmanuel Rossfelder became the first person other than Lagoya to perform the work publicly, with the Marseille Philharmonic. It was a beginning. But the rehabilitation of this Concerto — and indeed of so much of Tomasi's unfairly overlooked legacy — remains an unfinished task.

A Landmark Revival: Philharmonie de Paris, 2024

Since the original publication of this article in 2015, a significant and symbolically resonant event has taken place. On March 16, 2024, the first movement of the Concerto was programmed as a set work for the semi-finals of La Maestra — the third international conducting competition dedicated exclusively to women conductors — held at the Studio of the Philharmonie de Paris.

Four conductors performed the work across two sessions, each directing the Paris Mozart Orchestra with guitarist Sotiris Athanasiou as soloist and four conductors in competition. Both sessions were broadcast live on Philharmonie Live and remained available online for a two years.

The choice of this concerto for such a competition is itself a statement. La Maestra is one of the most prominent platforms in the world for the recognition of women conductors, just as the guitar concerto repertoire has been long dominated by the shadow of a single Spaniard. Programming Tomasi's Concerto — a work about an artist silenced by authoritarian violence — in a context dedicated to voices historically excluded from the podium is a convergence of meanings that Tomasi himself would surely have appreciated.

More practically, this is the most prestigious international exposure the Concerto has received since its 1969 premiere. For the first time, four conductors (rather than one) have now brought this score to life before a major Paris audience, and the work was heard by listeners across the world via the live stream. After more than half a century in the shadows, the concerto's rehabilitation is, at last, genuinely underway.

A Work That Deserves to Be Heard

The Guitar Concerto of Henri Tomasi is, in the truest sense, a work of witness. It does not illustrate Lorca's death from the outside; it attempts to inhabit his last hours from within — to make music of what it might feel like to be a poet, alone in a cell, with only memory and the slow approach of dawn. Against an orchestra that represents the hostile forces of history, the solo guitar does not heroically resist — it sings, stubbornly, with all the lyricism it can muster. It is the defence of the sources of song and life against those who would extinguish them.

This is also, ultimately, what separates Tomasi's Concerto from the rest of the guitar repertoire of his era. Most concertos of that period — however well crafted — are first and foremost vehicles for the soloist: occasions for display, for the pleasures of an identifiable national colour, for the comfortable satisfaction of a familiar aesthetic. Tomasi's Concerto is none of these things. It is a dramatic argument, a moral position, a requiem that refuses sentimentality. The guitar is not showing off, it is testifying.

That ambition comes at a price, as the Concerto's history makes painfully clear. Works that resist easy categorisation, that demand something from their performers beyond technical facility, that carry an argument rather than simply an atmosphere, tend to wait longer for their audience. But they also tend, when they finally find it, to hold it more deeply.

Maurice Fleuret wrote in 1982: "The Guitar Concerto appears to me a work of the highest order, destined for the widest audiences, and which should, in the years to come, enter the repertoire of a greater number of soloists and orchestras." That was over forty years ago. The work remains unknown to most guitarists and conductors. And yet, as the 2024 Philharmonie de Paris performance demonstrated, the tide is — slowly, unmistakably — turning.

The waiting feels less permanent than it once did.

More:

1. Original Article (PUP, 2015)
2. La Maestra's 1/2 Final (Philharmonie de Paris, 2024)
3. Henri Tomasi Official Website