The last couple of decades have brought as a novelty in the classical guitar world a large number of female performers appearing in the most prestigious venues and festivals.

This is not to say that women have taken a sudden interest in the guitar or music. During the last century there is plenty of material that attests to the contrary, and for the previous centuries, the abundant production of pictorial works that portray them is enough. In a certain sense, the ideals historically associated with the feminine (elegance, fine motor skills, delicacy) perfectly represent many of the things needed to play the guitar, an instrument in which physical strength does not play a vital role, while skill and, as in any art, good taste do. This is reflected in so many works of art from past centuries, which even portray members of the nobility playing stringed instruments, also showing the stature that society assigned to our instrument.

In a world in which everything always costs a little more for women, the new sphere of action opened by social networks (with their preeminence of the visual and the new element of interaction) seems to have opened a window of equality for them, at least in terms of diffusion, and so we find that the majority of the current guitar is made up of women. This, for many people, seems a novelty. Of course it is, but in this article I would also like to recall an era of the guitar in Argentina, the time of greatest splendor, when the most important and valued figures of the environment were female.

In the first half of the 20th century, Argentina saw an unparalleled development of its guitar culture, which made it nothing less than the world epicenter of the classical guitar. Not only humble families practiced the guitar, but also the wealthiest families, and the execution of the guitar was very common among society ladies. We see in the press of the time with astonishment how each academy performed recitals with almost a hundred students, and the number (in Buenos Aires, by dozens) of them was also astonishing. Many of these academies were founded by very important teachers, such as Sagreras, Prat, Leloup, Sinópoli, etc. From that first generation of teachers came a brilliant generation of guitarists. Many of them shone as performers, composers and teachers. The list of names would be endless. From the last third of the century, many of them were forgotten, remembering (as is usually the case) those who were successful as composers. A fair evaluation of that brilliant generation is still pending, including a great number of works that are waiting to be discovered and put in the hands of guitarists.

Such is the great oblivion about this era that it surprises those who learn that, around the middle of the last century, the most respected and recognized teachers on the scene were women. I was fortunate to learn about this history from several sources, including my father, who was able to meet many of them and receive their valuable guidance.

No account of guitarists in Argentina could omit the name of María Luisa Anido, possibly the most important classical guitarist in our history. Strongly encouraged by her father, Juan Carlos Anido (an outstanding promoter of the guitar in our country), she showed her aptitude when she was very young, having trained with no less than four of Tárrega’s pupils: Hilarión Leloup first, then Domingo Prat (as soon as he arrived in Argentina, he was hired by Juan Carlos Anido, Prat residing in the Anido’s house to teach María Luisa), in his absence, Josefina Robledo during her stay in Argentina, and finally Miguel Llobet, at that time, the most important figure of classical guitar in the world. As her teacher, Domingo Prat arranged for her to purchase the Torres guitar that belonged to Francisco Tárrega, who accompanied her throughout most of her career. Together with Llobet she formed a duo and recorded with him when she was still a child. Later she performed as a soloist and successfully on stages all over the world, until very old age. She also had a remarkable recording career.

She taught at the National Conservatory of Music and then privately. Among her students, all of them still active today, we find María Isabel Siewers (currently professor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg), Stefano Aruta ( who taught Aniello Desidero and Edoardo Catemario, among others), Eulogio Dávalos (currently director of the Llobet Competition in Barcelona), María Cristina Cid and Omar Atreo (who recently recorded the complete works of M. L. Anido). Roberto Aussel, although he considers himself a disciple of Jorge Martínez Zárate, was his student for a long time. Martínez Zárate himself studied with Anido at the National Conservatory. In her honor, the María Luisa Anido festival and competition is held annually in Morón (her hometown), where a high school bears her name. An Anido Competition was also held in 1995 in Barcelona, the same one that currently continues under the name of Certamen Llobet. In addition to her long friendship with Segovia, artists such as Emilio Pujol, Dimitriy Kabalevsy or Joaquín Rodrigo expressed their admiration for her.
Her authorial work is made up of about twenty short pieces of exquisite musical and guitaristic workmanship, mostly inspired by Argentine folklore, but captured through a somewhat impressionistic harmonic prism, perhaps influenced by her teacher Llobet.

“It gives me great joy to see so many children taking up the guitar. Times have changed: at the beginning of the century, everyone would say to my father with a tinge of scandal: “Why, woman and playing the guitar!”. I felt humiliated, but my father, whom I admire more and more in my memory, persisted in his project of making me a guitarist, perhaps without knowing that this would give me a universal “credit card” or “passport”. I became an incessant traveler, with my guitar on my shoulder, like the gauchos of my distant childhood. The guitar was my passport…”

María Luisa Anido

 

Consuelo Mallo López, contemporary of Anido, had much less international projection, but a great gravitation in the Buenos Aires scene, being one of the most recognized teachers, and perhaps the one who left a greater number of students. By the end of the 1930s (during which Anido retired from concert activity after the death of her father) she was considered unquestionably the leading figure of the guitar. Segovia himself went so far as to say “she is, at the present time, the highest expression of the guitar in this part of the American Continent”. Consuelo was also a child prodigy, a student of Domingo Prat. During her youth she was one of the most outstanding artists in an environment where the level was very high. Her contemporaries especially remember her “ lecture recitals”, around a theme or an author, such as the one by Moreno Torroba in 1934 (the then young Spanish composer who later called her “the most eminent interpreter of my guitar works”) or the program consisting only of Minuets by Sor. In these concerts she not only showed her culture and virtuosity, but also her vast (almost encyclopedic) knowledge of the guitar repertoire. She also frequently gave premieres or first performances in Argentina of works by Moreno Torroba himself, López-Chavarri, Pedrell, Galuzzo and Luna (two composers who wrote especially for her). She even seems to have done the same with the lute works of J. S. Bach, which were not known in Argentina. She also performed frequently with large ensembles of guitarists that she directed, made up of her students (in which, by the way, most of them were also women). Among her best known disciples we can name Cayo Sila Godoy (famous Paraguayan guitarist later recognized as a disciple by Andrés Segovia), Clara Sinde Ramallal, Juan Aragón Luna (professor at the conservatory of music in Buenos Aires for many years), Graciela Domenech and especially María Bello, with a long professional, recording and teaching career, since she worked for several decades at the Conservatory of Buenos Aires, where she was also my beloved teacher. Consuelo’s brother, Samuel Mallo López, was a cartoonist who portrayed many of the artists of that time (Llobet, M. L. Anido, Consuelo herself, etc.).

One of the first students of Consuelo Mallo López was María Herminia Antola, with whom she formed a very successful duo in the 1940s, with which they recorded. Antola was a guitar teacher at the Buenos Aires conservatory until the end of the last century. Among her most outstanding students we find Víctor Villadangos. Her husband, Jorge Gómez Crespo, was a notable guitarist and composer; his famous Norteña was played and recorded by countless guitarists.
The list of musical companions of Consuelo Mallo López is long over the years and, notably (except for her most numerous ensembles) was exclusively composed of her female students: Clara Sinde Ramallal, Delia Montero Ayala, Lydia Mabel Lynch, Abigaíl Lizzoli (Consuelo’s daughter), Juana Gómez Alcalá, and in her last years, María Bello.

Clara Sinde Ramallal had a remarkable career in Argentina and Latin America, also reaching – fortunately – the phonographic record, which allows us to appreciate the quality of her playing and her elegant and quiet musicality. She also had an outstanding performance as a lyric soprano, performing several important roles in Argentina and Venezuela.

María Angélica Funes completes, together with Anido and Mallo López, the triad of the most important teachers of Buenos Aires in the mid-twentieth century. All three were students of Domingo Prat and, at the same time, teachers of a new generation of guitarists. The Círculo Guitarrístico Argentino was formed around her figure, an association that continued its work for several decades. The aforementioned Spanish composer Federico Moreno Torroba dedicated seven of his works to him, which shows his importance and the consideration he received as a guitarist. Among his students, we can mention Guillermo Fierens, who would later stand out with a brilliant international career, being recognized by Segovia himself as one of his favorite disciples. M. A. Funes came to disc on several occasions, which gives us the possibility of appreciating his sound, which is especially striking for its quality and body.

Lalyta Almirón was also a child prodigy, although from a more modest family than María Luisa Anido. Her father, Bautista Almirón, also perfected under Prat’s guidance, was a renowned teacher, whose most notable pupil was the child Roberto Chavero, later known worldwide as Atahualpa Yupanqui (who names the Almirón family in his “canto del viento”). On one of his visits to Argentina, Agustín Barrios spent a long season in Rosario, visiting the Almirón home very frequently. Barrios dedicated the Minuet in A Major to Lalyta, who included works by Barrios in her programs from an early age. To see the precocity of her talent, the program of this concert she gave at the Teatro Solís in Montevideo when she was 9 years old is a testimony of her talent. Together with her father, she made a long tour of Europe in 1931 (when Lalyta was 16 years old), with great success, as reflected in the newspaper reviews. The following year she made a series of recordings for the Columbia label, which were released in Japan (in Argentina they were largely unknown until their diffusion in the digital era). Later she taught for a long time, especially in Rosario, where she was one of the driving forces behind the local and regional guitar movement. She performed several times with orchestra, performing in Argentina the premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez. She left a remarkable compositional work of very good quality. She was probably the first (and perhaps the only) Argentinean woman to premiere a concerto for guitar and orchestra. She also orchestrated a work by Agustín Barrios, which fortunately was recorded during a live performance. As with M. L. Anido, with whom she maintained a long friendship, she had a long life and extensive teaching and concert activity, maintaining her astonishing virtuosity even at a fairly advanced age, but, unlike her, international (and even national) recognition eluded her in her adulthood, at least in relation to the caliber of her talent.

An even less remembered name in Buenos Aires is that of “Monina” Távora, or Adolfina Raitzin, her maiden name. Initially a piano student, Andrés Segovia (during his long stay in Montevideo) encouraged her to study the guitar and took her as his disciple, and she was one of the few people who had a prolonged teacher-pupil relationship with the Spanish master. What seemed to be a meteoric career after her debut in New York, was cut short by her own decision, when she abandoned her concert career after marrying the Brazilian businessman Elysário Távora. Her last concert was in 1952 at Town Hall in New York. She settled in Brazil where she became a teacher. There she was the teacher of no less than two brother duos that were notably famous: Sergio and Eduardo Abreu and Sergio and Odair Assad. When Sergio Abreu left the concert activity to devote himself to lutherie, he gave her a guitar as a gift, which – fortunately – gave “Monina” the excuse to make a series of home recordings to show her sound.We can hear in them a very mature artist, with a calm and powerful sound, a very transparent and balanced musical expression, not affected by virtuoso outbursts, with the greatest naturalness to access all the coloration of the guitar, a very attentive expressive intensity and a great facility to solve the music she performs effortlessly.

Even less remembered is the life of Nelly Ezcaray, a student of Bautista Almirón first, and later of Prat. She also recorded on several occasions, probably in the 1940s. She taught at her own academy in Rosario, her hometown. She also formed, like Consuelo Mallo López, a guitar ensemble made up of women.

This small compendium of women guitarists focused on those who had greater notoriety, but it is not by far exhaustive or representative of the number of women guitarists who were relevant to the Argentine classical guitar scene in the first half of the twentieth century. As to extend some names, we should mention Celia Rodríguez Boqué, Victoria Testuri (both started playing guitar at a very early age, and Testuri, daughter of a guitar builder who worked for Francisco Núñez, trained by García Tolsa, Juan Valler and finally by Sagreras, had her own academy already in the 1920s), Carmen Farré (a guitarist of Catalonian origin and teacher for many years in the academy of her husband, Domingo Prat), Blanca Prat (Prat and Farré’s daughter), Lydia Lamaison (who later abandoned her career as a guitarist to pursue a very successful career as an actress, which is how she is remembered), Ana María Chazarreta (the daughter of Ángel, that great folklorist, and a student of Domingo Prat), and student of Domingo Prat), Irma Haydée Perazzo, Adela del Valle (of whom I truly regret not having more information, since she was a beloved student of Julio Sagreras, who also had his own academy), Elsa Molina, Noemí Toulouse,and a separate mention for Celia Salomon de Font, with an outstanding international career in the 1950s that connected her with Emilio Pujol (with whom she also took vihuela lessons), Andrés Segovia (she participated in his famous courses in Siena) and Joaquín Rodrigo, who dedicated one of his works for guitar to her; she also had a long career in pedagogy during the twentieth century. The list of performers who appeared in Buenos Aires performing a program of classical works (and in almost all cases, of great difficulty) goes on and on.

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By the 1960s, little of the splendor that Buenos Aires had known was left. Also, a new generation of guitarists began to take influence from other ways of playing and feeling the guitar. By 1980, Tárrega’s school had been almost completely abandoned, and the whole generation of guitarists who represented it better in Argentina than in Spain was no longer of interest to young guitarists, who were more interested in the ideas of Carlevaro, whose irruption into the guitar world marked a complete change of direction in Argentine guitar playing. The symbols of that old generation (Segovia as the first world figure, still in force in the very last stage of his career, María Luisa Anido as an absolute local reference, and all the guitarists referenced here who were still active during 1970 and several years later) suddenly became living fossils and, at most, they were honored in an appropriate way. It was necessary to give the impression that that generation had been overtaken by the next, which had more access to formal education and a wealth of knowledge. Perhaps the only one who definitely escaped oblivion was Anido, due to her wide international recognition. The rest of those named died almost in absolute anonymity, if not in poverty. Of several of these figures that once filled the pages of the newspapers of great circulation, in many cases, it was impossible for me to find out even the date of death or to find descendants.
The very little space that Argentine history has given to the great generation of guitarists of the first half of the twentieth century has been reserved for those who left some widespread composition, such as Gómez Crespo, or Julio Sagreras with his monumental didactic work. For the rest, so little has been left that even classical guitarists of the highest level of training are surprised by this account. The fact that they were women may well have contributed to this oblivion, but I fear that this oblivion was a scythe that passed almost without discrimination.

However, with their work, these truly outstanding figures opened a great path, which is still being walked today. In Argentina today, at least half of the teachers working in public institutions teaching guitar are women. This is particularly remarkable if we take into account that in the world of popular guitar, spaces seem to be opening up for women in a culture that intuitively relates guitar playing with manhood.
Cases like Anido’s or Almirón’s show that, when given the same opportunities, a woman could achieve the same as the men of her time, and, in fact, in both cases, I would say a little more, both considering the professional career they made and -above all- the level of virtuosity they had and maintained throughout their lives.

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This modest review of some of them was possible thanks to the oral accounts I received from my father, the concert guitarist Oscar Rubén de los Reyes, my dear teacher María Bello, maestro Emilio Colombo and other people who attended or aroused my curiosity on the subject. But fundamentally, with the profuse information and documentation that I found in two sources: the excellent book by Héctor García Martínez and Randy Osborne “Annotations for the history of classical guitar in Argentina (1822 -2000)” and the article by Patricia Di Lernia “Consuelo Mallo López, guitarrista argentina”, published in the digital magazine 4’33” of the UNA – Artes Musicales y Sonoras.
I have no doubt that this is just a fragment of a very wide story. Those who want and know more about the subject can contact me or -even better- share something in the comments section.