(San Juan Bautista de las Misiones, 5 May 1885 - San Salvador, 7 August 1944)
He is one of the great historical masters of the guitar. His figure is placed, in the general panorama of Latin American art, next to that of the most excellent musicians, writers, and poets who were able to bring together, in their work, the heritage of the European tradition and the vital aspects of the original cultures of the countries in they were born in and in the case of Barrios across the continent.
Acclaimed and discussed, exalted, and denigrated concert performer Barrios spent a wandering life, traveling throughout South and Central America without ever settling permanently anywhere except in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, during his last years of life. When his health was hopelessly declining. For a certain period, he appeared in public while continuing to perform the classical guitar repertoire and his compositions, dressing in Guarani costume, with the head adorned with feathers and the stage name of Mangoré, an Indian cacique who he had fiercely opposed colonization. He was also, briefly, in Europe in 1935 and played at the Brussels Conservatory, in normal regular clothes, and with his real name, but almost immediately returned to South America where, despite the legendary celebrity he had risen to, his art was never fully understood and appreciated in its actual value.
His glory is linked to the compositions for solo guitar that he wrote in the different periods of his adventurous existence. Many of them are popularly inspired pages, wisely purified and full of fascinating instrumental effects; others turn to romantic music and overflow with melodic inventions and refined harmonies; in other cases, Barrios' model is in Bach's preludes, but there are, in his work, pages of pure and daring harmonic speculation, such as the splendid "Prelude en do menor," in which the composer leaves folkloric memories behind and subjection to the great masters and rises in a solitary meditation imbued with poetry and spirituality. A legend that sees Barrios himself says that being outside a cathedral, he heard an organ playing, yet upon entering,g it, he saw no one playing it; this inspired the song "La Catedral."
From a musicological point of view, the disc recordings of his compositions that Barrios performed, starting from 1913, for the Atlantis / Artigas record company take on great importance. These recordings are considered the first guitar recordings in history, and the contribution of Barrios to the development of discography in this field is noteworthy. They are also an essential testimony to reconstructing the evolution of the executive style from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
