"Teacher Is Satisfied"

When young Andres Segovia told his instructors at Spain's Granada Musical Institute that he wanted to study the guitar rather than the piano or violin, they sniffed. The guitar was an instrument for gypsies, not for a young man who had ambitions to be a musician. Besides, no one at the conservatory knew enough about the guitar to teach it. Teenager Segovia stubbornly set out to teach himself.

In Paris last week, as chubby, greying Andres Segovia began his 41st year as a concert artist, there was no longer any question about the guitar's status as a concert instrument. For Segovia fans, it had lost practically all its associations with gypsies and romantically inclined caballeros, had become instead a sensitive interpreter of serious music. At 57, Segovia had played in most of the world's concert halls, had long ago won a world reputation as the guitar's acknowledged classical master.

To the meager score of existing guitar literature he had added more than 150 of his own transcriptions of works for harpsichord, lute, violin and piano by the world's great composers. Modern composers, hearing Segovia, began writing music especially for the guitar.

Last week his Parisian fans, overflowing onto the stage of the Theeatre des Champs Elysees, heard Virtuoso Segovia at his nimble-fingered best. Starting his program with a Bach fugue, he played transcriptions of works by Frescobaldi, Scarlatti, Haydn and Mozart, making his six-stringed instrument sound as brilliant as a harpsichord or as plaintive as a lute. When he concluded his program with music by Spanish Composers Albeniz and Granados, and the Italian, CastelnuovoTedesco, he was greeted with cries of "merci, merci" and "gracias," was shouted back for 15 curtain calls.

Segovia is beginning a tour that will take him to Belgium, The Netherlands, England, Switzerland, Italy and the U.S. before he returns to his present home in Montevideo. Like his compatriot, Catalan Cellist Pablo Casals, he has not returned to Spain since the civil war of the '30s. Still practicing from five to six hours a day, self-taught Andres Segovia often permits himself a restrained self-compliment: "The teacher is satisfied with his pupil."

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