Meeting Frank Bungarten, who happened to be taking a 5-day class at the delectable Casa Regina in Lippiano, Umbria, was like encountering a breath of fresh air. Here were all my pet beliefs encapsulated in one 40year old energetic teacher and superb guitarist from Germany. For a start, there was our mutual admiration of Sor with whom no other guitaristcomposer can be compared. For another there was my own profound admiration for his recordings – the brilliant interpretation of the 24 Caprichos de Goya by CastelnuovoTedesco, the first to get to the relationship between Goya’s bitterness and Castelnuovo’s own disillusionment at the end of his career Then there is his interpretation of the Sonata by Antonio José, together with equally searching interpretations of Ponce (Sonata Mexicana) and Castelnuovo Tedesco’s ‘Omaggio a Boccherini’ Sonata. To say nothing of his Bach, and his most recent recording, of Rodrigo’s music.

One lesson from our interview came out strongly: the need for a better legato among guitarists. Frank Bungarten makes even his diploma students (those on the way to becoming soloists) go back to the very basics, asking them to play the simplest singleline melodies with a good legato. They find it difficult, because it is difficult. And because, it might be added, very many guitar teachers at lower levels do not consider it of sufficient importance to spend too much time over. Frank Bungarten’s point is that you cannot even even begin to be a classical musician unless you have these techniques, whatever Your instrument. He is concerned to make the guitar as other instruments. It can be done, it has been done, but the doctrine is still not as widespread as one would expect or hope.

Frank Bungarten teaches at the Academy of Music and Drama in Hanover, Germany, and at the Conservatoire of Lucerne, Switzerland.

- Who were your first teachers?

Frank Bungarten: As far as the guitar goes, my background was really quite conventional. The classical guitarist I admired most was Andrés Segovia, and my favourite teacher was Oscar Ghiglia, from whom I had just one lesson, in September 1977. But my musical beginnings were influenced by quite another source: as a child, I was an enthusiastic altar boy in the Catholic church, and I was attracted as if by magic to the organ and the choir. I insisted on getting up early and going to the church before school so that I could absorb the atmosphere and the music.

Another memorable early musical experience was the first Beatles LP, ‘Please please me’, which my mother was given for Christmas in 1964. My sister and I listened to the record over and over again, and from then on it was quite clear what I had to do. Despite my extreme youth, I loved listening to rock music between 1965 and 1969, and this is when I started playing the guitar. Of course, I wanted to be another Jimi Hendrix, but my first lessons were with a ‘classical’ teacher. My ‘serious’; studies began when I was about ten, and my capacity for enthusiasm was so great that I soon decided that this was the sort of guitar I wanted to play.

Later on, when I was 15, I began teaching myself the saxophone, and I discovered avantgarde improvised music, above all free jazz. John Coltrane’s radical free jazz was what I liked best, and I looked for, and found, people with whom I could play this sort of music. The truth and spiritual power of this music make quite as great an impression on me today as they did then.

As far as classical music goes, I was primarily influenced by piano, violin and cello music. greedily absorbed everything I heard on the radio or gramophone, and I was fortunate in that my best friends played the piano, cello and violin. When I started studying in Cologne at the age of 17, some of my closest friends played these instruments, and I can truthfully say that my interaction with them was one of the most important, parts of my studies. This music brought me into contact with a conceptual and technical tradition and a seriousness which I had not encountered through the classical guitar. Later, I discovered that whereas this was very much a part of Fernando Sor’s approach, it had not been consistently followed and developed in the history of the guitar.

With stringed and keyboard instruments you can trace centuries of mutually influenced development. This is where a guitarist can learn most. Incidentally, my models were primarily the ‘historic’ musicians such as Edwin Fischer, Artur Schnabel and, in particular, Claudio Arrau.

- Did there come a time when you had to choose consciously between classical and jazz?

FB: Yes. Funnily enough, I was quite successful with the saxophone during my guitar studies in Cologne. I hung around in jazz circles and was regarded quite highly as a saxophonist and improviser. Our band obtained some very good engagements, and I started to consider taking up the saxophone seriously. But I did not feel I had much to gain artistically. I felt that with the saxophone, rather like the piano, the models were overpowerful, and that everything worth saying had already been said. A great jazz musician is always a composer, a pioneering creator, and I did not feel that I had as much of this sort of energy as a strong love of what had already been created and a desire to do something with it.

In all honesty, I must confess that despite my admiration for the great guitarists such as Segovia, Bream and Williams, I always felt there was something missing in their playing, and that there was more to be done. I thought the art of guitar playing was nothing like adequate with regard to dynamics and polyphony. I regarded pieces that had already been played in a hundred different interpretations as a great challenge, and 20 years ago there was, and still is, a lot of music which has never been adequately interpreted. I also always had a clear idea of how Bach could sound on the guitar, and I was very keen to work on realising my inner vision.

- I assume you did your own transcriptions?

FB: Yes, definitely. I recorded the violin sonatas in their original keys in 1987 after at least ten years of experimentation which taught me that I could not, and must not, add a single note of my own, and that my job was to discover the fingerings and way of playing that would make the music sound good on the guitar.

- Were you thinking of the violin in particular or as a guitar piece?

FB: I have always regarded it as absolute music.

– Which you play on a guitar

FB: It is just a tool. In my opinion, the guitar is a good tool for polyphony, but even so the instrument is stretched to its utmost limits, just as the solo violin is. Of course, I have played the socalled ‘lute suites’ as well, but I do not find them as satisfying, because it, is just too painful to have to omit so many notes and change so much in such a perfect structure. The great thing about the violin works is that you play all the notes the composer wrote, like a pianist playing a Beethoven sonata.

- Are you going to record any more Bach?

FB: After the Bach recording, which was quite successful, the record company repeatedly asked me about the three missing violin partitas, both for commercial reasons and because of their inner convictions, and I am going to record them in autumn 1999. I had to think about it for some time because some of the movements of the partitas are extremely violinistic and thus less suitable for the guitar.

Now, however, twelve years after the sonatas, I think I have found the way to tackle the partitas.

- Can you tell me something about the CastelnuovoTedesco Caprichos de Goya? In your liner notes, you describe them as the composer’s ,magnum opus’, and certainly it is a very big work. There are 86 caprichos by Goya, and lie set, 24: why didn’t he do more?

FB: He was fascinated by the number 24, especially by its historical models in which a cycle of 24 – an ideal harmonic and symbolic number – plays a part. Also, he was thinking about making it a double LP – which was a feasible form at the time – with six pieces (one volume) on each side. Another reason was the advisability of limiting the number of pieces in order to avoid repetition and tiring the listener.

- Before I read your notes, I hadn’t realised that CastelnuovoTedesco was capable of this satire, this irony. Yet in Capricho No. 15 he satirises serial music. He takes a row – not a random line, by the sound of it, but all the same he makes his point. Are there any other instances in the 24 Caprichos where he is being strongly satirical?-

FB: Oh yes! He is sarcastic on several levels and with many crossreferences. In particular, the work has an autobiographical level in which he takes an ironic look at himself. It is a late work which reveals the serious nature of his mature creative period, for example in the ‘Dies Irae’ and in Number 24, with the grand fugue. It is clear that towards the end of his life he became quite bitter, owing to the disproportionately little recognition accorded to his work, largely because he had always remained true to his style and ideals.

- But Goya’s bitterness and satire were part of his nature, even as a young man. So there’s a difference in the level of the satire, even though there’s a strong link between them. In fact, you talked about some ‘initial irritation’ at the differences of idiom – diametrically opposed’ was your phrase, I think. What did you mean by 'irritation’?

FB: I felt that the musical language of CastelnuovoTedesco, as we know him, was in fact too elegant and delicate for the Goya subject, and I was wary of taking on a huge amount of work only to find in the end that what I was striving for was impossible. But the deeper I delved into the music, the better I understood what was meant, and the surer I became that I would be able to express the composer’s intentions fully if I stuck faithfully enough to what he had written. I relied entirely on my faith in the composer and on my own skill, and I became more and more certain that I was on the right track.

- You have to think of his state of mind as well?

FB: Yes. In a way, you have to become immersed in the composer’s world. But it is the score itself that provides the information, far more than the biographical details. I believe you can find out everything you need to know by studying the score.

If you approach a piece of music from the outside, with the aim of producing superficial effects, the results will be different from when you develop your interpretation from the inside and base everything on the innate quality and truth of the composition. With the guitar, it is very tempting to go all out for quick, superficial effects, because of course the instrument is very good at them.

Naturally, when you delve deeply, humbly and carefully into the musical structures of a composition, everything becomes much more difficult and takes much longer, and the result is a profound, integral interpretation rather than superficial popular success.

Unfortunately, the wonderful works of CastelnuovoTedesco are usually played on the guitar in a mutilated form – notes are left out, the partwriting altered, chords turned upsidedown, structures and tempos changed. The result may sound more or less the same on the surface but in reality it is a different piece of music. CastelnuovoTedesco articulated his intentions very precisely and skilfully, and I try to play all the notes and not to deviate from his text and markings. If my interpretation of the work makes an impression on you, this is the main reason. If pianists were to leave out around 25 per cent of the notes in Liszt’s Transcendental Studies and, for example, play the fifthsixth chords as rootposition triads, the pieces would be much less effective. OK, the Caprichos de Goya are unplayable, but I try to play the unplayable version.

- Is this what you meant by ‘distortions of musical meanings’ on the part of editors?

FB: Yes. Publishers and players tend to take it upon themselves to change what the composer wrote. You have to search longer and work harder to find solutions to extreme difficulties, but this sort of work gives you the chance of discovering the guitar all over again and expanding the possibilities.

- You talked about ‘one supreme challenge after another’

FB: Yes. These challenges required two years – wonderful years – of very hard work. At first, the whole thing seemed impossible; incredibly complicated structures – for example, threepart writing with the top part legato, the middle one staccato and a different rhythm in the bass, with a decrescendo in one part and a crescendo in the other. Numerous short articulated notes, parts running in all directions, and extreme dynamics – all this gives the work its strong, grotesque character.

And the sweet, lyrical moments in Castelnuovo’s music can only really come into their own when the complete harmonies are played. Every note altered or left out changes the timbre, etc. This means that the key to this music is ‘faithfulness to the original’, and this demands especially dedicated work. Sometimes you work out specific, crazy fingerings, practise them like mad for six weeks and have to start all over again because you find a better solution, and so on....

- You referred to a ‘new dimension in guitar playing’

FB: Above all, you have to pay very careful attention to the problem of polyphony, as well as to articulation. It is very difficult to produce a real legato on the guitar, really to make the instrument sing, and this is a problem that is not taken seriously enough by teachers and students of the instrument. On the other hand, it takes a good deal of skill to produce a really short, controlled staccato, particularly one rel vant to the sharp, grotesque character of this music. A real staccato is quite a different thing from something that simply sounds as if the guitarist were incapable of playing legato.

- In other words, you have to be able to play legato in order to make your nonlegato sound right?

FB: Exactly. For example, CastelnuovoTedesco demands legato and staccato at the same time in different parts – and with different dynamics. It can nearly drive you out of your mind. This was the new dimension you mentioned, and it has changed my playing. I never before had to produce so many grades of tonal colour in order to bring out the character of the music beyond the usual ponticellotasto stuff as I did with the Goya project.

- This morning in your class you were showing how a line should be phrased by singing it. Suddenly it was a lovely legato phrase, and it made sense.

FB: Playing the guitar with the same directness as if one were singing is certainly the goal, and in fact it is the basis of everything else. With my pupils in the solo class – the highest level – I begin with Fernando Sor’s Etude No. 1, and students with the most advanced technique find it just as hard to play a simple, onepart, naked melody naturally and easily as first semester students do. I base everything on this fundamental experience. Everything, even the most difficult things, must be connected with the natural quality of breathing, with dynamics, with the living interaction of tension and relaxation. Unfortunately, with the guitar it is all too easy to think too much about finger technique and separate the mechanical processes from musical perception. I try to counteract this. First of all, you have to grasp the structure, the inner content, the spiritual perception of the music. Without this, your fingers cannot make a single meaningful movement. This means that ‘practise more’ means simply ‘understand more profoundly’.

- Tell me something about the Sonata by Antonio José. You said you had similar problems with the printed editions.

FB: It was exactly the same problem and the same solution. Classical music is based on rules, rules of composition and partwriting. A version which constantly goes against these laws for the sake of simplification is, to me, not a valid solution. The José sonata was the first guitar work in which I documented this approach as far as I could. With Rodrigo, too, which I recorded last, I tried to implement my rather scrupulous attitude towards the ideas that the composer wrote down, even in extremely difficult passages, and to accept the validity of the score in the same way as a conductor does.

- Can you say something about your Sor recording? You chose 24 Studies, your favourites, and to me you seemed to give them a new signficance.

FB: I love Fernando Sor’s music, and the fact, is that many of his pieces only work when you take them very seriously and play them exactly as they are written. This recording was very important to me. As far as the commercial side goes, I made a big mistake. I chose a sequence in the circle of fifths, beginning with C major and ending in D minor, and tried to create an inner organic progression which draws the listener in more and more compellingly. I began with the perfect, threepart Chorale op. 6 no. 8, in a sense a proclamation of polyphony; however, this piece does not make a particularly guitaristic impact, and experience has shown that people who listen to the first track of a CD in the shop often want to be impressed by loud, fast music with an immediate impact. The second track, the Fugato op. 29 no. 5, would have been more effective. Sor requires a different kind of attentiveness from the listener, and unfortunately he does not sell very well. Only yesterday evening I was telling my pupils about an American magazine that had published an unfavourable review about the 1990 Sor CD, suggesting that the music was dull and uninteresting. Five years later, however, the same critic took back what he had said and wrote another review saying that he had now listened to the record properly for the first time, and that this time he had understood it. I think this says a lot about Sor, and I was delighted. This music needs time and patience, it does not aim at superficial effects, and I have learned not to set my sights on quick success. Many people are only now discovering my recordings of the Bach sonatas, though my CastelnuovoTedesco CD has not had the success one might expect despite the German record prize. Actually, I had expected more of a reaction from the guitar world. However, I am a longdistance runner as far as my work is concerned, and perhaps this reaction will also come in ten years’ time. I am a convinced supporter of classical values. The more committed a guitarist feels to classical values and perfect craftsmanship, the more highly he values Fernando Sor. I can take quite as much pleasure in a perfectly composed threepart piece of music as in a Greek drama, a classical poem or the antique furniture here in this building, and I prefer a handmade Italian jacket to trendy massproduced fashion. Among Sor’s works, I prefer the Chorale from op. 6 to the Variations from op. 9, although the latter clearly have a much greater superficial impact.

- Tell me about your other recordings. And your future plans.

FB: There was an LP with the Folia Variations by Ponce and five works by Barrios which I made at the age of 23 and which is unfortunately not available on CD, and a video of the Aranjuez Concerto which appeared in Japan. The Rodrigo recording, with Elogio de la guitarra as the title piece, has just come out, and this too is music to which I am deeply committed, particularly the less often played works in this unique neoclassical Stravinsky~Falla style. My next recording will be a CD of 19th century opera paraphrases. I plan to continue making around two CDs a year with my excellent record company, and to devote myself increasingly to the betterknown guitar repertoire.

(January, 2000)