Matanya Ophee
On the occasion of Segovia’s 90th birthday in 1983, the venerable Guitar Review published a similar dedicatory issue.3 There is no mention in either volume that during his long career Segovia made four concert tours in the Soviet Union, in 1926, 1927, 1930 and the last time in May of 1936, two months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. One is hard pressed to Wnd mention of Segovia’s extensive involvement with the Soviet Union in any interview, biographical essays or other writings about him published outside of Russia, with the remarkable exception of the mention of his March 26, 1926 Moscow concert in P.J. Bone’s Dictionary.4 Perhaps the Wrst, and only time Segovia himself had mentioned his travels to the Soviet Union in a Western publication, was in an interview he gave to Georges Jean-Aubry,5 which was published in the Christian Science Monitor on April 16, 1927, shortly after Segovia’s return from his second trip to the Soviet Union. In the interview, titled the Spell of the Guitar, Segovia is reported to have made some ridiculing remarks about his experiences with Russian guitarists and their instruments of different sizes and with a clearly disparaging exaggeration of their guitars having more than 50,000 strings.
Segovia and the Russians
