74 The EconomistAugust 22nd 2020
A
lmost as soonas he started his long love affair with the guitar,
Julian Bream was aware he was doing something disreputable.
When he was caught as a teenager practising Bach in the Royal Col-
lege of Music, he was warned not to bring that instrument into the
building again. It lowered the tone. Signing on to do his National
Service in an army band, he was told he could play piano and cello,
fine, but the guitar only “occasionally”. Audiences clapped long
and hard when he performed in the Wigmore Hall at 18, in 1951, but
as he toured round Britain in the mid-1950s, sleeping in his Austin
van to save on hotels, not many came to hear him. The guitar was
not a proper instrument, somehow. Its voice was too soft to carry
over an orchestra. The electric version was for pumped-up rock ’n’
rollers, the non-electric for holidays in Spain. And from Spain, the
spiritual and historical home of the guitar, came the loudest scorn
of all. An Englishman playing a guitar, said one virtuoso, was a
kind of blasphemy.
But this Englishman, almost as devoted to cricket and dogs as to
music, was in love, and nothing was going to deter him. His life’s
passion was to restore the guitar’s reputation as a serious instru-
ment, to bring its acres of repertory to the public, and to open their
eyes to its beauty. He offered a different approach, clarity and a cer-
tain coolness, against the emotional vibrato of the Spanish style.
To get the message across he toured the world, picked up four
Grammys in the process, encouraged the building of guitars in
England, and asked the best composers of the day—Benjamin Brit-
ten, William Walton, Michael Tippett, Hans Werner Henze—to
write pieces for an instrument they had never considered before.
His methods of persuasion were chummy and larky, as might be
expected of a South Londoner, proudly born in Battersea between
the power station and the dogs’ home: convivial drinks, invita-
tions to his farmhouse in Dorset, races round the lanes in his clas-
sic cars, demonic table-tennis games. And they worked.In effect he had two lives. One was the gregarious whirl of jet
planes, hotels, parties and interviews, when he would throw him-
self around in his chair with the sheer joy of talking guitars. The
other was rapt communion with the object of his love. No one had
taught him how to play, beyond basic scales and chords as a child.
He had picked up technique for himself, and was continually
stretching and perfecting it. Practice demanded at least four hours
a day, but he also took long sojourns away from the stage to study,
play alone and gather his thoughts. To learn Britten’s “Nocturnal
after John Dowland”, which was nearly beyond him, he immured
himself in a shepherd’s hut on Robert Graves’s estate in Majorca. To
make recordings, he would use an empty chapel near his house, at
night, with no one else there save a producer and one sound engi-
neer. This intense need for privacy inevitably flowed over into his
performances, he and his guitar alone and barely moving in the
spotlight, his body bent low over the instrument, coaxing the
strings to express more, wincing when they did not, opening his
mouth with delight, closing his eyes, until he was almost surprised
on finishing to find an audience there.
Where had this passion come from? Partly from his father, who
played in a dance band and left his own guitar lying about at home;
partly from the burning anguish of Django Reinhardt and the
Quintette du Hot Club de France; partly from watching Andrés Se-
govia, the greatest Spanish master of the age, closely through
clenched binoculars at a London concert. Still quite young, he had
followed his father’s repair of a battered Ramírez guitar, discover-
ing the instrument’s inner life. He could tell later, simply from
playing for a few minutes, how the internal bars were spaced, or
what adjustment, perhaps a thousandth of an inch, was needed in
the bridge saddle. He mourned lost loves: the little singing guitar
made for him by José Romanillos in 1973, which after a decade had
started to lose its vitality, as they all did; the noble Hauser and the
Bouchet, an absolute pearl, stolen from his car in the 1960s. But the
instrument’s character flaws did not escape him either. The guitar
might be a great wooer, so suggestive in its fullness and complexity
of tone; it could also be obstinate and shallow, a deceiver.
In that respect he seemed to love the lute even more. This, too,
he rescued from ignorance and virtual obsolescence, revelling in
its repertory of songs and sad airs from Tudor and Elizabethan
times. (He supposed that, like all jesters, he was a melancholy per-
son underneath.) Again, he taught himself to play, starting as a boy
on a lute picked up by his father, dodgily, for a couple of quid on
Charing Cross Road. He persevered with this new enterprise of
plucking with his nails rather than fingering, and formed a consort
of period instruments to revive the music, mostly, of Dowland and
Thomas Morley. The tenor Peter Pears teamed up with him for lute
songs. Against the democratic guitar, played from street corner to
(now, at last) concert hall, the lute struck him as more beautiful,
more aristocratic, more honest. It was also guarded by scholars,
who criticised his technique until, in his usual style, he shut him-
self away and worked out mutually, just man, instrument and
many packs of Gauloises, what needed to be done.
One great attraction of the lute was its relative Englishness. The
spirit that lived in it, and had done since the wood was first fash-
ioned from the tree, was one he instinctively understood. All
through, though, he knew that the spirit of the guitar had been in-
fused in Spain. There was no getting away from this, nor from the
country whose language he never spoke but whose music made up
most of his life. So in 1985 he tipped his English hat to it, with an
eight-part tvseries called “¡Guitarra!” in which he described the
history of the instrument, went to bars, smoked cigars and played
in Spanish cloisters, villas and castles, looking perfectly at home.
Yet perfection was always two steps off. Did he feel, an inter-
viewer once asked him, that he had removed the tag of “blasphe-
my” from an Englishman playing the guitar? Had he, in fact, sanc-
tified it? The question stunned him for a moment. Then he
stammered, with his flat London vowels, “Not necessarily.” 7Julian Bream, champion of the classical guitar and the lute,
died on August 14th, aged 87Passion plays
Obituary Julian Bream