THE GUITAR SOLDIER

François de Fossa (1775–1849)

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ABOUT THE ALBUM

This recording offers a renewed engagement with the music of François de Fossa, one of the most distinctive figures of the early nineteenth-century guitar. Soldier, traveller, and cultural mediator, de Fossa embodied a musical identity shaped by movement, encounter, and transformation.

Rather than presenting a complete anthology, the album proposes a curated selection of works that reveal the expressive breadth of his language: from Fantaisies inspired by Beethoven and the Folies d’Espagne, to the intimate Recuerdo dedicated to Dionisio Aguado, and refined transcriptions from Haydn. Together, these pieces bridge Viennese classicism, Iberian rhythm, and a deeply personal conception of virtuosity.

The interpretative approach is grounded in a close dialogue between score, historical treatises, and instrument. The music is performed on an original French guitar from the first half of the nineteenth century, whose resonance and physical response actively shape phrasing, articulation, and sound projection. Treatises by authors such as Aguado and Leopold Mozart are approached not as prescriptive models, but as conceptual tools through which notation, gesture, and musical character can be re-examined.

Interpretation here emerges as a process of re-imagining rather than reconstruction: a historically informed practice in which analytical knowledge is gradually absorbed into the body and translated into sound. Virtuosity is not conceived as display, but as the result of an embodied interaction between musical thought and physical experience.

Recorded in August 2025 in the Church of San Bartolomeo (Nomaglio, Italy), the album invites the listener to encounter François de Fossa not only as a historical figure, but as a living voice — one that continues to speak through the tension between discipline and freedom, structure and imagination.

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