Fernando Sor

Fernando Sor (baptized February 14, 1778, Barcelona, Spain—died July 10, 1839, Paris, France) was a Catalan Romantic performer, composer, and teacher of guitar known for being among the first to play the guitar as a classical concert instrument and for writing one of the earliest books of guitar-playing methodology. He was a noted guitar virtuoso.

When he was a young boy, Sor was introduced both to Italian opera and to the guitar, the latter then considered distinctly plebeian and inferior to orchestral instruments. He attended the Escolania de Montserrat, the choir school at Montserrat monastery, and, when he was 18 years old, attended military school in Barcelona for four years. In 1797 he staged his first opera, Il Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso (“Telemachus on the Island of Calypso”). As a result of that work, he moved in 1798 to Madrid, where he was supported by the duchess of Alba until her death in 1802. When Napoleon and the French army invaded Spain in 1808, Sor first supported the Spanish side. He then switched allegiances when Spain was defeated and took a post with the new French government. When Napoleon was subsequently defeated in 1813, Sor left Spain for France and remained in exile for the rest of his life.

Sor taught and performed on the guitar while living in Paris. In 1815 he moved to London, where he stayed until 1823. While there he wrote music prolifically. He published 33 Italian ariettas for voice and piano (11 publications with three pieces of music each) and had four ballets produced there, notably his Cendrillon (Cinderella), which was staged in Paris in 1822 and, after a successful run, went to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Sor traveled to Moscow to oversee the production and returned to Paris about 1826. In 1830 Sor published Méthode pour la guitar (Method for the Spanish Guitar, translated into English 1832), a book of 30 studies for guitar that is still considered, in the early 21st century, to be a major contribution to classical guitar studies. For the remainder of his life, Sor was highly sought after as a teacher and a performer throughout Paris.

After his death Sor’s compositions fell into obscurity, as did the classical guitar, until the instrument and Sor’s repertory were revived in the 20th century by Spanish guitarist and composer Andrés Segovia. Very little was known about Sor’s life (his grave was unmarked until 1934) until the release of the Brian Jeffery’s biography, Fernando Sor: Composer and Guitarist, in 1977. Although Sor composed hundreds of works—including operas and ballets and pieces for voice, guitar, piano, and other instruments—he is chiefly remembered as a composer and performer of music for the guitar and as the person responsible for granting that instrument respectability. Grand Sonata in C Major, Op. 22 (written by 1808) and Introduction, Theme and Variations on a Theme from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Op. 9, for guitar (c. 1820–23), are among his best-known works.