A Life in the Master’s Hands

The first thing you notice are the hands.

They are broad, massive, almost the size of dinner plates. Each finger is nearly as thick as a roll of quarters, long and covered with rough skin hardened into an eternal callus.

They are the hands of Jose Candido Morales, big enough to manhandle a guitar, big enough to command a class of bored teens, big enough to span nearly a century.

Morales is one of four known living students of Agustin Barrios Mangore, one of the foremost classical guitar composers and performers of the early 20th century. Of the four, he is the only one still teaching, still imparting the mysteries and technique of the Paraguayan guitarist.

Morales is an old man, and fading. He will turn 89 later this year. One eye is fogged by a cataract. He is hard of hearing. A thick brace wraps his neck to help with the pain from a back injury. His fingers lock in place at times, rigid from arthritis. And his mind clouds over now and again, lost in memory.

He has one mission left. It lies in a sheaf of papers, his last lesson, an attempt to record all the guitar techniques Barrios taught him and that he in turn has passed on over the years.

In the six decades since Barrios’ death, Morales has written a book on the composer. He has taught hundreds of students to play Barrios’ demanding music. And even now, he pours out the stories and philosophy of Barrios’ life for hours on end.

Morales studied exclusively under Barrios for just half a year. But that period was so intense and vivid, so filled with discovery and a young man’s wonder, that it has sustained Morales for a lifetime.

The bond between the two men is no coincidence. They were twins of a sort. Both were raised in rural Latin America. Both began playing the guitar in bars and street corners. Both lived through savage wars that affected their careers.

But in one way, the men are opposites. Barrios was a consummate performer, vagabonding his way across Latin America and Europe, playing hundreds of concerts. Only toward the end of his life did he slow down enough to open a permanent school.

Morales, on the other hand, performed intermittently and, if you believe his own assessment, never with the skill of his mentor. Instead, Morales devoted almost his entire life to teaching, the first half as a grade school instructor, the second, after his brief introduction to Barrios, as an acolyte of music.

It is the paucity of time spent with Barrios that still brings Morales sorrow many years later.

“I had hardly touched the banks of an enormous sea,” Morales says now, sitting on the worn, red velvet couch of his modest home in an old neighborhood of San Salvador. “And then, Barrios died.”

Barrios an Extravagant, Bohemian Figure

Agustin Barrios Mangore was born in 1885 in a backwater town in Paraguay, a backwater country.

His father, an Argentine government trade official, and his mother were both lovers of culture, and they introduced Barrios to the guitar at a young age. Soon, he attracted the attention of an Argentine guitarist who persuaded his parents to send him for formal training in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital.

From there, Barrios launched into the life of an itinerant musician, giving concerts in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay. He journeyed up the Amazon, playing at the famous opera house in Manaus, deep in the Brazilian jungle.

He was an extravagant, bohemian figure, a ladies’ man, a poet and a calligrapher. At one point, he took to dressing up like a Paraguayan native--Mangore is a stage name (he used it with Nitsuga, Agustin spelled backward), taken from a mythic indigenous figure. He appeared on stage in native dress, surrounded by tropical plants and reciting the poetry he also composed.

During his travels, Barrios composed an estimated 300 works, many of them wildly expressive. Only 150 remain, since he only occasionally bothered to write them down. Barrios exploited his instrument’s fullest potential. He thumped the body, plucked the strings, moved all over the neck. He turned the guitar into a mini-orchestra, coaxing from it the sound of drum, bugle or even men marching in the street.

The music he wrote was renowned for its difficulty and originality. For one of his most famous works, “A Dream in the Glade,” he had a special guitar built with an extra fret in order to play the high C he felt the piece demanded.

Barrios also played almost exclusively with metal strings at a time when most classical guitar players used gut. This was physically demanding, and he regularly exercised, even developing a special workout for his fingers and chest. This allowed him to play with tremendous speed, Morales said, as can be heard in one of his most technically difficult pieces, “The Cathedral.” The piece supposedly represents Barrios’ feelings as he moves from the tranquillity of a church to the busy streets, the music building from slow, broad beginnings to tremolos of breathtaking rapidity.

The pieces are popular among today’s classical guitarists around the world, both for their musicality and for the extent to which they push the guitar’s limits.

“His compositions are really guitaristic,” said Tim Hall, founder of the San Francisco Classical Guitar Society. “If you played his music on the violin, it’d be awkward. If you tried on the piano, you’d lose the character. But playing his music on the guitar is perfect.”

Toward the end of his life, suffering possibly from both syphilis and heart disease, Barrios settled in El Salvador, in search of the warmer climate doctors had recommended.

It was there that he started teaching. And it was there, when he performed at a small country school, that Jose Candido Morales first heard the work that would alter his life.

Morales Becomes Student of Barrios

It was a violent clash of steel that saved Morales from life in a forgotten corner of El Salvador.

Morales was born in 1912, in the mountainous northern department of Chalatenango. When he was about 17--his memory’s not quite clear--Morales and a fellow villager got into a duel over a woman, fought with machetes. Morales disarmed the other man, then fled. For his safety, his father sent him away to a school in a provincial capital.

It was there that he first picked up the guitar, mostly because he didn’t like playing the violin.

“My teacher brought me a guitar and told me, ‘The violin is easy. What’s hard is to play music on the guitar, to bring the strings to life.’ And so I began to play the guitar,” Morales said.

At first, he played in bars and schools, strumming tangos and local folk songs, and he also accompanied showings of silent films.

But it wasn’t until he began his career as a schoolteacher that he first encountered Barrios, at a concert in 1939 in the department of Usulutan, in the western part of El Salvador.

“I fell in love with his music. That night, I couldn’t sleep for the excitement of having heard him,” Morales said. “What an incredible man he was.”

By 1944, Morales had become head of a school close to San Salvador, where Barrios was teaching at the conservatory. Still enchanted by the music he had heard five years earlier, Morales decided to follow his dream of becoming a student of Barrios.

He spent three months taking classes from Barrios twice a week, then threw himself into the classes, stepping up to seven days a week. The lessons lasted for an hour, then Morales would practice the rest of the day.

“People said I was crazy. I spent six months with Barrios, but it was like two years because of all that I learned,” Morales said.

Barrios doted on Morales. He even allowed him to name his last known composition, popularly called “Grand Tremolo” but which Morales labeled “Song to Polimnia” (Polimnia is the Spanish name for the Greek muse of oratory or sacred poetry).

In poor health, recovering from a heart attack, Barrios realized that he would die soon. But in the last few months of his life, he received an invitation from RCA Records to come to New York to record his works.

He eagerly accepted. It represented a chance to expand his music’s reach. To raise money, he decided that he and Morales would tour in Central America. He never made it. On Aug. 7, 1944, he died without setting foot in RCA’s New York studios.

Delayed Appreciation for a Master

In the years after Barrios’ death, Morales returned to teaching school. He also gave weekly concerts on the radio, playing for an hour at a time, live.

He played once at the National Theater in downtown San Salvador, a free concert. It was packed, and when he had finished playing, he received a standing ovation. “It was a triumph,” he said, his face breaking into a smile.

But it wasn’t until he retired from teaching school in 1972 that he began to devote himself full time to music instruction. He opened a school and gave it his master’s stage name: The Academy of Nitsuga Mangore.

“I saw there was no other way of preserving the Barrios technique,” Morales said.

That was because in the years after Barrios’ death, he was all but forgotten. He never managed to achieve widespread recognition beyond South America. In part, this was because of bad timing. His single trip to Europe, then the world’s cultural center, was overshadowed by World War II. He journeyed through Spain just as its civil war was starting.

It was also because of his eclectic style. Barrios’ music had more in common with the Romantic era of classical guitar than with popular or classical music in the second half of the century.

Only in the late 1970s, with his rediscovery by Australian guitarist John Williams and biographer Richard Stover, did the music world begin to appreciate his gift.

“He was one of the greatest geniuses who ever picked up a guitar,” said Stover, who has spent much of the past three decades tracking Barrios’ music, recordings and life. “He absorbed everything that had gone before him and took it a few levels up.”

Then came a wave of interest in Barrios, but it coincided with the U.S.-backed war in El Salvador that left more than 75,000 dead and split the country into two ideological camps.

“In the middle of a war, who would come to take classes?” asked Walter Quevedo, one of Morales’ pupils and today one of El Salvador’s most talented classical guitarists. “It was a great shame.”

Morales tried to stay neutral during the war, having been accused of being a Communist during leftist purges in the ‘30s. The worst aspect of the war, he said, was watching the fear and repression drive artists and art away from his beloved country.

“The war destroyed our culture,” Morales said. “The U.S. should fund classes here. What would they cost? Nothing. But culture is so impractical.”

All through the violence, Morales struggled to keep his classes going. Quevedo first took classes from him in 1983, just as the civil war was heating up.

Quevedo remembers asking for directions to the classes. Morales told him to go to a particular park and “follow the music.”

“I did it. And after the bus had pulled away, I could hear the music. His studio was several blocks away. But he was playing, early in the morning, this enormous volume of sound,” he said.

Teacher’s Demands Are Legendary

Today, Morales’ school is closed, but he still gives lessons at his home. There are fewer students now, and on some days no one comes at all.

But he remains a legend among San Salvadorans of a certain class. Nearly every parent who wanted a teenage child to benefit from the finer points of music sent a son or daughter to Morales.

His demands are legendary. Push-ups are a common part of his regimen, following Barrios’ exhortation that guitarists must be fit to play.

On a recent June day, 13-year-old David Pompilio was sweating under Morales’ stern glare. In one year of lessons, he had already learned to play bits and pieces of seven works by Barrios. Now, he was trying to learn “Adelita,” the most demanding to date.

Outside his teacher’s earshot, Pompilio said Morales was strict.

“But I think it’s something positive,” he added with haste. “It inspires us to practice more.”

After his students left for the day, Morales sat down to enjoy a Guinness as his wife and her son bustled around their small home, intent on dinner.

His wife, whom friends call the Saint, has taken on the daily household responsibilities, answering the phone, setting up doctors’ appointments and guiding Morales around the house. His adult stepson, who has a learning disability, lives at home.

The day had been hot and long. But once the topic of Barrios arose, Morales brightened. He talked at length of his time with the man he still calls his “master.”

And he begged a visitor to help him publish a book on Barrios’ technique. Then, another idea struck him.

“Maybe you could propose a center in Los Angeles, a center for Mangore so that this advance, this technique will not be lost,” Morales said. “It gives me great pain, how few people know his techniques.”

Finally, with some coaxing, Morales picked up a guitar to play some of his own compositions. One, to a daughter (from an earlier marriage) who died of cancer, he called “Juliet.” A second, inspired by a pretty farm girl, he called “Happy Girl.”

He curled his body around the guitar, wrapping it between his chest and knee and drawing it close to him. His fingers were stiff, and he apologized for any fault in the music to follow.

Then, eyes fixed on a distant point, he began to touch the strings, his fingers moving across the neck in a comfortable, familiar way, like two old friends shaking hands.

The music filled the room.

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Times special correspondent Alexander Renderos contributed to this report.