The late Leif Christensen, was, as all his friends knew, one of the most broadly grounded guitarists
in the world
when it came to the literature of the instrument. He knew all periods; he snubbed none. His tragically brief recording
career only gave a small indication of his interests and enthusiasms. Leif played contemporary music well (his was
the first recorded performance, and arguably the best, of the Henze Royal Winter Music sonatas). But a year or so
before Leif's death Colin Cooper of Classical Guitar magazine asked him what he thought of the current status of
guitar composition, and his answer set Cooper back on his heels. He thought a moment and said, "The best comes up
to Carulli, perhaps."
Carulli? Carulli? I can hear the anguished groans all the way to my friend Ray Burley's house in Oxford.
But there you are. Christensen wasn't a man to pull your nose for you, or to make light conversation. When he said
something he usually meant it. The comment was partly a sadder-and-wiser commentary on the state of
contemporary guitar music, by a man who'd played virtually everything--and partly a re-examination and reevaluation of the period of common practice.
Leif, mind you, was the first great pioneer of the movement to play nineteenth century guitar music on nineteenth
century instruments. His recordings, on antique guitars, of Regondi and Sor and Giuliani were landmarks in the
movement, and his posthumous influence is still powerfully at work. Leif had the knack of listening to music with a
fresh new ear, and of blowing the dust off things other people had neglected--even other people whose own
competence, understanding and adventurous spirits were beyond question. We all neglected Regondi (the late
Siegfried Behrend, who was one of the most adventurous guitarists I've ever known, once spoke of him as "10,000
notes signifying nothing"), and then Leif showed us all how to play him. Now we all know what made Regondi the
most famous guitarist-composer of his day.
All right. You simply had to listen to anything Leif Christensen said. He had that kind of authority, young as he was.
Today, then, we consider Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841).
Let's admit it right off. Carulli wrote too much. He was the Alexandre Dumas pre of music. (It's a good
comparison. The two knew each other, after all, and Dumas was a fan of Carulli's.) Both men wrote like factories,
not composers. They had enormous glibness, enormous competence, enormous audiences. They might have done
well to have burned a certain percentage of their work rather than seeing it come to print.
So why didn't they? Carulli is not on the record in the matter. Dumas is. He, at least, admitted freely that he needed
money, lots of it. Dumas employed researchers to do the research for his historical novels (I understand perfectly. I
did myself, writing novels of my own). He even hired people to take dictation, write whole sections of his books for
him, flesh out bare outlines. (I never figured out how to afford this.) Is this how Carulli managed to publish over 400
works in his 23 years in Paris, despite a busy concertizing career and a heavy teaching schedule? Did he have
apprentices helping him grind out the work? Are we talking about a sort of "School of Rubens" approach here, with
the master doing a cartoon and the pupils doing a bucket-brigade job applying the paint? (I remember the "Medici
room" in the Louvre. I will personally eat every dab of paint Rubens actually applied himself to those ten-foot circus
poster horrors.)
The "School of Carulli" approach is my own tentative answer to the question, which is simply stated in two parts: 1.
Given this fecundity, why is so much of Carulli so good? 2. And why is so much of the rest of it so bad? (Look at
the lone--and exquisite--Rubens in the National Gallery in Washington. All the difference in the world: this one he
painted himself.)
All right. Let's see if I can find you some good Carulli to play. Try, for starters, then, a fat volume called Oeuvres
choisies pour guitare seule, a 1979 facsimile edition selected by Franois Lesure for Minkoff Reprints, Geneva. You
may even have some fun with this book. There are, for instance, student pieces virtually anyone can play, and some
of them are quite beguiling: the three easy sonatas of op. 7; six delicious sets of variations, op. 73, on Airs Nationaux
de tous les Peuples d'Europe; a simple, programmatic pice historique called La Paix, possibly commemorating the
end of the 1830 revolution.
All of this is delicious stuff if you don't demand that a piece be as serious a work as a late Beethoven quartet. There's
even one good concert piece in it, so uncharacteristic that people won't believe you when you tell them they've been
listening to Carulli. This is a Fandango: Danse Espagnole, op. 73, No. 2, and it's akin to the one Soler wrote for the
harpsichord and the one Boccherini wrote for guitar and string quartet (in Quintet No. 4 in D). It'd make a terrific
encore, particularly if you souped up the last seven measures with a bit of rousing rasgueado and ended the piece
with a real bang.
More: there's a fine Sonata in C, op. 16 (Moderato, Adagio, Rondo Allegretto), and there's another of Carulli's odd
programmatic