The Machinery of Suppression: How John W. Duarte Tried to Destroy Narciso Yepes

A forensic reconstruction of institutional gatekeeping in classical guitar, 1948–1961

Narciso Yepes at the Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires) in August 1962 — eighteen months after his Wigmore Hall (London) debut and Duarte’s attack.

In February 1961, a 33-year-old Spanish guitarist gave his official London debut at Wigmore Hall. The concert sold out. The audience demanded four encores. Five days later, an overflow crowd packed the Instituto Cervantes of London to hear him again, listeners spilling onto landings and staircases.

Within weeks, the guitarist’s career would be subjected to the most sustained critical attack in classical guitar history — not because of how he played, but because of what he represented: a threat to an established order.

This investigation does not cover Narciso Yepes’s critical reception in its totality. It focuses specifically on his early career as represented in the English-language guitar press — predominantly B.M.G. magazine — and documents how neutral-to-positive coverage of his career’s trajectory transformed into a systematic attempt to derail his meteoric rise.

I. Ascent Without Stigma (1948–1954)

Narciso Yepes first appears in B.M.G. magazine in September 1948. Wilfrid M. Appleby reports matter-of-factly on a Madrid performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez: “Yepes ‘sailed right into it,’ giving a splendid performance which won high praise from the critics.”

Over the next six years, the trajectory is consistent: neutral-to-positive coverage tracking a widening orbit. By May 1949, a Swiss Radio broadcast is described as “outstanding and masterly… his tone mellow and crystal clear… his technique so effortless that one does not notice it.” In February 1953, Peter Sensier praises Yepes’s guitar work in the BAFTA- and Academy Award-winning French film Jeux interdits: “handled with effect… a definite ‘must’ for players of the Spanish guitar.”

LP releases follow: Concierto de Aranjuez with the Orquesta de Cámara de Madrid (London TW.91019), a Decca recital disc (LXT. 2974)… International touring expands: Italy, Austria, Brazil, Argentina… In September 1954, Die Volksmusik reports on a Vienna concert. By November 1954, L’Arte Chitarristica tracks a successful Italian tour. All of this is charted in the pages of B.M.G.

Nowhere in this six-year span does any reviewer mention a “thin” or “clipped” sound, “persistent tuning problems,” or anything “wayward.” These tropes do not yet exist.

II. Planting the Myths (1955)

In July 1955, a reviewer writing under the pseudonym “Discus” evaluates Yepes’s Decca recital album. The review introduces what will become the conceptual architecture of subsequent attacks:

“Narciso Yepes is one of the two best known and most advanced pupils of Segovia… It must be said without further delay that in Yepes there is no trace of the genius, the interpretative fire, or the tonal beauty of the youthful Segovia… A rough estimate would be that Yepes possesses (compared with Segovia at a similar age) about 75 per cent. of Segovia’s technique and 40 per cent. of his musical genius.”

[embed]Narciso Yepes in 1955, from the disc under review. Judge for yourself whether the league table framing is quantitively justifiable or made-up numbers (i.e., propaganda).

[embed]Andrés Segovia in 1955, as the allegedly 60% greater musical genius. Judge for yourself whether the league table framing is justified or just propaganda.

Three elements are seeded here:

1. A false “pupil of Segovia” claim. Yepes never studied with Segovia. His only pedagogical interaction with the latter was a 1960 Compostela masterclass, witnessed by the composer Leonardo Balada, in which Segovia “was very hard on him” for playing his own version of Bach’s Chaconne (transcribed whilst studying with Nadia Boulanger and George Enescu). Balada documents: Yepes replied that “he had come with great humility to study with him and to listen to his advice, and not to be criticised so harshly, it was something almost personal.” That was the extent of the ‘study’: excommunication. Yet five years earlier, “Discus” had already suspiciously positioned Yepes as Segovia’s subordinate.

2. League-table framing and ‘quantified’ genius. By ‘measuring’ Yepes against “the youthful Segovia” in imaginary percentage terms, the ‘review’ establishes a hierarchical frame in which Yepes can only ever be a lesser version of the master.

3. Tonal inadequacy and “clipped” bass notes. The July 1955 review criticises “Bass notes [that] are frequently clipped,” establishing the oft-parroted “clipped tone” trope that would later be mindlessly contrasted with Segovia’s allegedly “flowing style.” By December 1955, reviewing Yepes’s 1953 mono recording of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, “Discus” crystallises the sound critique: Yepes’s “rather thin tone is occasionally swamped” by the orchestra.

This last claim contains an immediate contradiction. In the same review (December 1955), “Discus” praises pianist Gonzalo Soriano’s coupling on the album’s reverse as a “wonderful… crystal-clear recording: yet our preference is for the warmer and more flexibly phrased playing of Larrocha…” If the “thin” tone were an artefact of recording quality or engineering, it would presumably affect both performances. It does not. The label is selective.

[embed]Narciso Yepes (6-string guitar) performs the Adagio from Rodrigo’s concerto in 1953. Judge for yourself whether accusations of a “clipped” and “thin” sound were representative of empirical reality or propaganda, bearing in mind that (unlike most classical guitarists) Yepes didn’t rely on amplification.

By 1959, reviewing a 1957 stereo re-recording of the Aranjuez, “Discus” backtracks without retraction: “the re-issue [!] is a marked improvement… the Concerto is warm-blooded… Yepes copes well enough with the intensely difficult guitar part.” (Note the backhanded, condescending “copes well enough.”) The accusation of “thin tone” is quietly dropped — but never honestly corrected, despite the fact that “Discus” mistakes the new recording for a “re-issue.”

“Discus” was John W. Duarte. As if it wasn’t obvious from the anti-Yepes agenda, vitriolic pomposity, and use of the royal plural, Paul Fowles confirms: “In the 1950s and ’60s, Duarte… made significant contributions in the burgeoning field of music journalism, penning a column in BMG magazine (where he sometimes reviewed records under the name ‘Discus’).” (Classical Guitar, Autumn 2019)

Duarte’s original accusations of a “clipped” and “thin” sound — later parroted widely as received wisdom — is disproved by spectrographic analysis of Yepes and Segovia recordings. Yepes’s tone shows greater sustain and low-mid spectral energy (a dark and rounded tone, not a bright and thin one); Segovia’s shows brighter timbral characteristics, with often staccato articulation. The accusation was an inversion of acoustic reality.

Yepes (1961 Scarlatti K.11): Pronounced lower-frequency content (light orange/yellow banding) — a dark, projecting tone. Energy focused on fundamentals and low-mid partials, not high frequencies.

Segovia (1957 Scarlatti K.11): Less pronounced lower-frequency content, more mid-high spectral energy — a brighter, thinner tone than Yepes.

Narciso Yepes — Bach Chaconne opening (1959). Continuous lower banding = legato phrasing. Concentrated low-frequency energy (bright yellow/white) = dark, projecting tone. This is what Duarte called ‘clipped’ and ‘thin.’

Andrés Segovia — Bach Chaconne opening (1954). Gaps between chords (darker vertical bands) = staccato/clipped articulation. Energy distributed evenly across frequencies = brighter, thinner tone. Duarte’s accusations fit Segovia better than Yepes.

These spectrograms illustrate specific passages where Duarte’s blanket accusations — Yepes’s “clipped” and “thin” tone (opposed to Segovia’s) — are demonstrably false. Can one find moments of staccato articulation in Yepes’s playing? Of course — just as one can in Segovia’s (very often), or any great musician’s. The issue was never whether Yepes ever employed staccato; it was that he didn’t replicate Segovia’s specific interpretive choices. He sometimes played legato where Segovia played staccato, and vice versa, according to his own musical judgment honed by conservatory-trained pedagogues.

Duarte’s accusations were unfalsifiable precisely because they tended to be waffling blanket statements. By characterising Yepes’s entire sound as “thin,” his basses “frequently clipped” (rather than noting specific interpretive differences), Duarte underhandedly framed non-conformity to Segovia’s template as inherent deficiency. What he condemned as technical and musical inadequacy was, in fact, interpretive autonomy — the ‘sin’ from a neoclassical Modernist perspective that denied the validity of interpretation itself.

By 1955, Segovia had explicitly embraced Stravinsky’s neoclassical ideology of performance. Guitar Review’s 1947 editorial proclaimed: “Andrés Segovia… does not ‘interpret’ music to us — what we hear is the music itself. Segovia is Bach — he is Albéniz, Weiss, Tárrega, Sor — Segovia is them, reincarnated…” In Bernard Gavoty’s 1955 Andrés Segovia, the guitarist declared his commitment to both Ortega y Gasset’s waggish ideals and Stravinsky’s Apollonianism, stating: the guitar is “synonymous with mirth” and “I personally have always tried to give her an Apollonian character. I love order and clarity and balance: I am suspicious of Bacchic ecstasies.” Within this Stravinskian framework, to interpret differently was not merely to play differently — it was heresy against the composer’s supposedly reincarnated voice.

This difference was incomprehensible to someone like Duarte: musically untrained (an industrial chemist turned self-taught ‘authority’ on music), lacking conservatory grounding in interpretive principles, and fundamentally unmusical in his approach. He engaged music not through innate giftedness but through acquired theory, formulaic analysis, and parroting of Authority. Duarte himself composed typically waggish, neoclassical Modernist opuscules — the Daily Telegraph’s later dismissal of one as “a shapeless, impersonal nocturne that was scarcely worth the hearing” suggests he understood the aesthetic formulaically. When confronted with a gifted musician who’d studied with the likes of Nadia Boulanger, Duarte could only perceive deviation from Segovia’s template as error. He mistook imitation for understanding, and conformity for competence. Within the authoritarian neoclassical framework that denied interpretation’s legitimacy, Yepes’s conservatory training in interpretive principles became evidence of deficiency rather than musicianship.

III. Global Consolidation vs Template Reinforcement (1956–1960)

Whilst Duarte’s myth-seeding continued in B.M.G., neutral reportage in the same magazine documented accelerating international demand:

February 1956: A Brazilian broadcast is “devoted to the recordings of Narciso Yepes.”

December 1957: Radio Nacional Argentina airs interviews of both Yepes and Segovia, “answering questions concerning modern guitar-composers, matters of technique, the guitar movement in Europe and the U.S.S.R. and the guitar and orchestra.”

January 1958: Yepes performs at Teatro São Paulo. The programme includes Bach’s Chaconne — the same transcription that would later trigger Segovia’s wrath at Compostela.

June 1958: Three recitals in Egypt (Cairo, Alexandria).

June 1960: A South African tour. Oliver Walker, chief music critic of Johannesburg’s The Star, will later report that Yepes’s reception “equalled that of Segovia here in 1956.” The same interpretation of the Chaconne that triggered Segovia’s wrath inspires Fritz Buss to move to Madrid, despite vowing “a hundred horses” couldn’t drag him back to Europe. (Buss had already received — and declined — a similar invitation to study with Segovia.) Another critic, writing for The Cape Argus, reports on Yepes’s 21 June recital for the Cape Town Concert Club: “All the way through the programme he kept his listeners’ attention focused on the instrument as the shining star of the evening, rather than on himself as performer.” The latter is quoted in the December 1960 edition of B.M.G.

September–October 1960: Twenty recitals in Japan, eight in Tokyo alone. Guitar News (May–June 1961) reports that Yepes “was surprised at the popularity and progress of the guitar in that country. It is estimated that there are about 300,000 Japanese guitarists! There are 80 Professors of the Guitar in Tokyo alone!” Following Japan, he gave recitals in Lebanon.

This is the context in which Yepes arrived in London for his official debut. He was not an unknown quantity — as the opening of Duarte’s Wigmore Hall review tellingly documents: “His name has been known to us for many years.” He was an established international artist with major orchestral collaborations, a “best seller” record of Rodrigo’s concerto, film work (Jeux interdits had been a cultural phenomenon), international LP distribution (including Latin America, South Africa, and Japan), and triumphant tours across four continents. People were travelling from as far afield as South Africa and Japan to study with him. He had also been excommunicated from Segovia’s 1960 Compostela masterclass for the ‘sin’ of artistic autonomy.

IV. The 1961 London Flashpoint

This Wigmore Hall advert appears in the February 1961 issue of B.M.G.:

FRIDAY, FEB. 17th, at 7.30 p.m. | WIGMORE HALL | Wilfrid Van Wyck Ltd. present NARCISO YEPES | THE FAMOUS SPANISH GUITARIST

The same February issue reports that Fritz Buss and Timothy Walker — teacher and student in South Africa — have departed for Madrid to study with Yepes. That people (including one who had rejected an invitation to study with Segovia) were travelling from as far as South Africa and Japan to study with Yepes must have unnerved the establishment. As Fritz Buss later recalled, “there were always Japanese people” studying with Yepes whenever he visited.

The concert sold out. Two months later, the April 1961 issue reports what happened five days after the Wigmore debut: on 22 February, the Instituto Cervantes of London was “packed to capacity by an enthusiastic audience which overflowed to the landings and staircase.”

In that same April issue, B.M.G. publishes two responses to the Wigmore concert.

The Feature: Ivor Mairants

Ivor Mairants — a London guitar shop owner with expertise primarily in jazz — opens his front-page interview by noting “he played to a full house at the Wigmore Hall… he received a tremendous ovation and had to give four encores.”

The interview documents Yepes’s deliberate technical divergences from what Mairants calls “the Segovia ‘school’”:

• Posture: Yepes places the guitar’s lower bout on top of the right thigh, not the waist of the guitar against the left thigh. “His right hand was more free… the position of the left hand was made easier.”
• Right-hand mechanics and tone production: By resting his right upper arm on the side of the lower bout, with the forearm free, Yepes achieves “thicker and stronger” chords “without any snap” — refuting Duarte’s earlier accusation of “rather thin tone.” Moreover, he plays scales with three RH fingers, demonstrating “the rate of a crotchet equalling 158 — which is really fast.”
• Phrasing autonomy: When Mairants challenges Yepes’s slower tempo in the Sor–Mozart Variations, Yepes responds: “It is, after all, an andante.” On Recuerdos de la Alhambra, he defends non-canonical phrasing: “You see, from Bar 9 it consists of a harmonic progression followed by two similar ones and it is necessary to have a breath after each phrase.” [Tárrega’s original tempo, as per his manuscript, was Andantino; the actual title: Improvisación ¡A Granada! Cantiga árabe.]

When Mairants begins, “But Segovia plays it like…” Yepes interrupts: “Although he had a great admiration for Segovia, he did not have to play like he does: adding it was not necessary for him to listen to a Segovia record and try to copy it.”

Mairants concludes: “I hope readers of this column will be, like me, a little wiser than before.”

The Attack: Jack Duarte

Immediately following Mairants’s feature, John W. Duarte — now writing under his own name — publishes a savage, 2,000-word ‘review.’

Opening frame:

“An artist who presents himself in the Wigmore Hall automatically invites high-level criticism — as he walks on to the platform he joins the great musicians of the past and the present and it would be wrong to greet him with the same enthusiastic indulgence he would meet in a parish magazine.” [This from B.M.G. — “Banjo. Mandolin. Guitar” magazine!]

On the opening Mudarra Fantasia X:

“A certain waywardness in the soloist’s rhythmic pulse was disturbing.”

Duarte admits the work is “interesting and, to us, new.” The “waywardness” he hears is intrinsic to Mudarra’s composition: syncopated rhythms and false relations (deliberate dissonances). Duarte has misattributed compositional features to the performer. He never retracts this claim. Instead, “wayward” becomes a permanent label, recurring in nearly every subsequent Duarte ‘review’ of Yepes.

On tuning:

“When a third work in succession… was given with faulty tuning, we began to wonder how any sensitive musician could possibly play for so long, so badly out of tune.”

By the Bach Chaconne — whose variations Yepes (unlike Segovia) had dared to delineate with phrase breaths — Duarte escalates:

“Add to this persistent out-of-tuneness and the result is one of the most dreadful travesties of great music we have heard in many years.”

On canonical policing:

Duarte frames Segovia’s transcriptions and recordings as normative. Of the Scarlatti Sonata (K. 11): “already heard this season from Segovia, John Williams and Alirio Diaz… Yepes’ reading was weak, rhythmically erratic and totally unconvincing.”

Of the Bach Chaconne: “There already exists a magnificent transcription by Segovia (also recorded by him)… Yepes made his own transcription and one can only wonder why he did it.”

[embed]Judge for yourself, from this 1961 recording, whether Yepes’s playing of the Sonata in question was “rhythmically erratic and totally unconvincing.”

[embed]Segovia playing the same Sonata by Scarlatti in 1957. Judge for yourself whether the “erratic” rhythm attributed to Yepes was a case of projection (for non-conformance to an idealised template, itself rhythmically erratic).

On audience reception:

“The soloist did not realise fully the poetry of the [Ruiz-Pipó] Song but he played the Dance with great verve and to good effect. The first encore was a dance from The Three Cornered Hat by Falla (a real ‘rabble rouser’ if ever there was one)… At this point I left, having heard enough — but there were two or three further encores for an audience which was fairly restrained in its reception until the end of the programme — at which point ‘encor-itis’ set in. This is a disease to which guitar audiences are peculiarly prone.”

Duarte admits it is “a first performance here” of Antonio Ruiz-Pipó’s Canción y danza №1, written for Yepes, yet presumes (or pretends) to know “the [full] poetry of the Song.” He then recasts multiple encores and ovations as pathology. Besides exhibiting typically Modernist contempt for the audience, the frame also inoculates the narrative against contrary evidence: if the audience loved it, the audience is sick.

[embed]Narciso Yepes performs Antonio Ruiz-Pipó’s Canción y danza no. 1 in 1968.

Summation:

“On the musical front he is not a great interpreter… His playing glitters like sparks but, like those sparks, has little heat content. Guitar audiences love display and ‘Spanishery’… and he will doubtless continue to succeed with them. For the musician, however, there is little to satisfy, spiritually or intellectually, and a great deal to irritate.”

One factual error undermines the entire review’s credibility: Duarte calls the concert “Friday, March 17th.” It was February 17th. For a critic claiming meticulous attention to detail, misremembering the date suggests the review was written from memory rather than notes — or worse, from agenda rather than observation.

V. Eyewitness Refutation

In the July 1961 issue, Oliver Walker — chief music critic of Johannesburg’s The Star — responds to what he calls Duarte’s “odorous diatribe” that “discolours your April issue”:

“People better acquainted than myself with the politics of London’s guitar underworld and its rivalries will be more equipped to assess the reasons for the unbridled viciousness of Jack Duarte’s attack… Was it possible, or even likely, that Senor Yepes who toured South Africa in 1960 and enjoyed a success equalling that of Segovia here in 1956 should have played mostly out of tune (as Mr. Duarte claimed) and that every major work in his programme could be seriously faulted in one way or another?

“I was able to assure them [i.e., South African guitarists] that either Mr. Duarte has mislaid his ear-trumpet or his arteries had got the better of him through being forced to stand at the back of a crowded and vociferously enthusiastic hall.”

Walker’s testimony is forensically precise. He was present in the hall. He describes it as “crowded,” the audience “enthusiastic.” He rejects the tuning claim as absurd, first in his July letter to the editor, then again in his October response to Duarte’s vituperative tantrum that another critic had dared to call him on his bad faith:

“That, to me, is grossly impertinent not only to the artist internationally acclaimed but to the rest of the audience that encored Senor Yepes many times. Or is Mr. Duarte so conceited that he imagines his was the only ear able to detect when a guitarist is consistently out of tune? To any responsible music critic such a comment is as ludicrous as saying that Claudio Arrau should brush up on his five-finger exercises or that Yehudi Menuhin should learn how to tune his fiddle.”

Walker’s professional credentials matter. He was not a “guitar enthusiast” with partisan loyalties; he was a working critic for a major newspaper. True, his son Timothy had just departed for Madrid to study with Yepes — alongside Fritz Buss, who had been Timothy’s teacher in South Africa. But any attempt to dismiss Walker’s testimony on grounds of familial bias has three fingers pointing back at Duarte: Duarte publicly claimed to have “taken over” John Williams’s “musical education” when Williams was eleven (giving the impression, as Williams’s official biographer William Starling put it, that Duarte “did everything but give birth to the guitarist”). Duarte also boasted of his “friendship of thirteen years or more” with Segovia and maintained associations with Julian Bream and others in the anti-Yepes orbit. If proximity to a subject disqualifies critical judgement, Duarte had already disqualified himself.

John W. Duarte with Julian Bream; John Williams with John W. Duarte.

John W. Duarte with Andrés Segovia.

Moreover, Walker’s willingness to publish such a forceful rebuttal — knowing his son had literally just travelled halfway around the world to become Yepes’s formal student — suggests confidence in his observations, not partisan defensiveness. A father/critic whose son had just entered a student-teacher relationship has every incentive to avoid public controversy. That Walker published the letter anyway indicates he witnessed something so at odds with Duarte’s account that silence would have been professionally untenable.

The distinction between impartial criticism and partisan advocacy matters. The late Harold C. Schonberg, senior music critic of The New York Times, articulated the principle in a 1981 essay:

“Maybe it worked that way in the past, but today things are different, to a point where many music critics won’t even talk to one another, much less become friends with musicians they have to review. There are today, it is true, some critics who actively enter into the musical life of the community. But not the critics of The New York Times.

“Naturally, we meet many musicians on a professional basis — for interviews, background material, feature pieces, gossip. As newspapermen, we have to know what is going on. We cultivate a network of sources and even of Deep Throats. But that is acquaintance, not friendship. Virgil Thomson once said that he could review his own grandmother and it would make no difference. I was skeptical about that statement then and I remain skeptical now. Can any human be that dispassionate? In addition, the musical colony is small and inbred, and it can be vicious. Nobody will ever believe that a Times critic can give an impartial review to a friend. Hence as a matter of policy Times critics are not supposed to be close to musicians they may be in a position of reviewing. If they are close — and sometimes that is unavoidable — the critic is supposed to disqualify himself. …

“By the same token, no Times critic can himself be a performer or composer. No matter how pure he may be, conductors or potentates of the musical establishment will be after him, flattering him, offering him commissions or performances… It is a policy rigidly enforced by me, and it is a policy that angers many musicians… ‘If you knew that Mr. Webster and I were very close friends, would you believe anything I wrote about him?’… ‘And would you believe anything I wrote about another pianist?’”

Schonberg’s standard — critical distance from subjects — was the norm in professional journalism. Duarte operated under no such constraint. He reviewed artists he claimed as friends, students he claimed to have taught, and records produced within the Segovia network he championed. When challenged, he invoked those very relationships as proof of his authority. This is not criticism. It is propaganda.

VI. The Segovia Network Mobilises

In the June 1961 issue of B.M.G., Vladimir Bobri — editor of Guitar Review and known Segovia loyalist — sends a letter:

“Will you please convey my sincere congratulations to Jack Duarte on his lucid and constructive criticism on the Yepes and Ramos concerts. His is the sort of reporting that should do a great deal towards the dispelling of unwarranted admirations.”

Bobri’s intervention proves the attack was not isolated. It was endorsed and amplified within the Segovia network.

On the same page, another reader dissents:

“Thanks to R. Martin for a very human letter. This makes better reading than the vitriolic and pedantic Jack Duarte type letters that seem to crop up all too frequently!” — Dick Chapman

VII. Duarte’s Response: Authority Through Proximity

In August 1961, Duarte publishes a 1,200-word response to Walker. It is a masterclass in deflection:

On professional standing:

“It does not in the least distress me that a few vociferous people, unknown to me other than by their signatures choose to pour out abuse on my head… In the last analysis it is not necessarily the opinion that counts, it is the standing of the person who expresses it.”

On credentials:

“If he wishes for my credentials he may ask Andres Segovia for them — our friendship of thirteen years or more qualifies him reasonably well for the task.”

Duarte does not defend his critique with musical argument. He invokes Segovia as guarantor of his authority.

On geography (and politics):

“Situated as he and his audience are, in Johannesburg, he is not exactly in a position to speak with authority on the classic guitar. What are his points of contact? Sporadic visits from Segovia and Yepes?”

The implication: proximity to London (and Segovia) confers legitimacy. Distance from the imperial centre disqualifies.

Duarte’s geographic dismissal carries an unstated subtext — association with apartheid South Africa as moral disqualification: “Having committed himself so deeply in his own country, he clearly finds it necessary to make a militant effort to save face.” The insinuation collapses under scrutiny. Oliver Walker was an Englishman born in Birmingham whose journalistic career beyond music criticism was marked by excoriating critiques of South African apartheid government policy. His investigative work exposed failures of the Native Affairs Department so thoroughly that his official report was suppressed by the authorities. Walker died in South Africa in 1965, having spent his career documenting systemic injustice — not endorsing it.

Fritz Buss, who hosted Yepes in Johannesburg and subsequently studied with him in Madrid, was a Kölsch-German whose family opposed the Nazi regime. It was Jürgen Schadeberg — the renowned anti-apartheid photographer and activist — who first introduced Buss to Yepes’s recordings. Buss tellingly enjoyed strong support from South Africa’s Jewish community, acknowledged as “the father of the [classical guitar] genre in this country” (South African Jewish Report, 15 May 2009). His students Simon Wynberg and Timothy Walker later collaborated extensively in London with exiled South African composer Stanley Glasser, another prominent anti-apartheid figure.

[embed]Buss alumnus David Hewitt performs his composition “Shebeen” in Jürgen Schadeberg’s “The Seven Ages of Music” (1992).

[embed]Buss alumnus Timothy Walker performs “Mr Masenga’s Walk” by Stanley Glasser, written in 1978 for Simon Wynberg.

If Duarte’s credibility rested on his “friendship of thirteen years or more” with Segovia, then Walker and Buss’s associations speak equally clearly. The difference: Duarte invoked proximity to power. Walker and Buss’s networks aligned with those opposing it.

Duarte’s geographic attack was cynical misdirection. Segovia himself performed in apartheid South Africa in 1956 — the very tour Walker cited as comparison for Yepes’s 1960 reception. Ida Presti, Alexandre Lagoya, Renata Tarragó, Alirio Diaz, Siegfried Behrend, Ernesto Bitetti, Carlos Bonell, and numerous other international artists performed in apartheid South Africa. Julian Bream and John Williams never visited, even after 1994. The Bream/Williams camp presumably framed this as ethical principle. Yet the pattern suggests another explanation: South Africa had developed a favourable view of Yepes. Avoiding the territory avoided the comparison and a potentially unfavourable reception.

On unnamed corroborators:

“The fact of Mr. Yepes’ out-of-tuneness was noted and remarked upon by several other excellent musicians with whom I spoke at the concert.”

Duarte never names them. When pressed, in his November follow-up, he adds:

“Wild horses will not induce me to name the persons concerned but I will add the comment made to me during the concert’s interval period by a personal friend of Sr. Yepes — himself a musician. He greeted me with: ‘It’s so bad, what on earth can I say to him?’”

An unverifiable anecdote by a witness of bad faith, attributed to an anonymous “personal friend,” invoked to explain why a full house gave four encores — and why, five days later, an overflow crowd spilled onto landings and staircases at the Instituto Cervantes of London.

On Walker’s credentials:

“Finally, may I return his compliment by saying that I have never heard of Mr. Walker outside the pages of ‘B.M.G.’, though I do read the general musical press, if not down to the smallest type.”

Walker responds with surgical precision to Duarte’s voluble tantrums in a final missive of October 1961:

“Methinks Jack Duarte doth protest too much! Speaking as one professional critic to another (I may be flattering Mr. Duarte here because, outside the specialist magazines devoted to the guitar I have not seen his name) I must tell him he could have used a quarter the words to answer me and been twice as effective. “It may be, as he says, ‘difficult to move very far in the world of the guitar without encountering his name.’ Musically this proves nothing beyond the old adage that a specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less. Whether he calls Andres Segovia by has Christian name or not is also immaterial. … “I did come across Mr. Duarte’s name on one other occasion in, I think, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ when a critic wrote of a work by him that it was a ‘shapeless, impersonal nocturne that was scarcely worth the hearing!’”

Duarte invoked Segovia as guarantor of his authority, but what were his actual musical credentials?

In 2011, guitarist Philip Hii documented his experience ‘studying’ with Duarte in 1980. After travelling from New Zealand specifically to learn from “the great man himself,” Hii discovered the reality behind the critic’s pretensions. When Duarte finally picked up a guitar during a lesson, Hii observed that he “could hardly hold the guitar properly and what came out of his fingers were a few scratchy sounds.” Having previously studied with Karl Scheit — one of the twentieth century’s finest guitar teachers — Hii was shocked to find himself “taking a lesson with a man who could barely hold the instrument, let alone play it.”

The £11 lessons (approximately £47.47 in today’s money) consisted almost entirely of gossip about other guitarists, especially Segovia. When Hii sought another teacher, Duarte’s response was characteristic: “three typed pages of pure vitriol and biting sarcasm,” threatening to contact immigration authorities to have Hii expelled from the country. Hii was forced to abandon his planned Wigmore Hall debut and leave England.

Hii’s account was corroborated in the comments on his blog: “I’ve heard similar stories about Mr. Duarte: that he talked a bunch and generally avoided teaching.” Another commenter noted that “JW” had called Duarte an “old windbag,” and that Guitar Magazine ran a comic strip featuring a bespectacled, pipe-smoking ‘expert,’ sporting a chin strap beard, named “Wyndham Waffle” — transparent satire of Duarte’s verbose evasions.

‘Wyndham Waffle’ from Guitar Magazine. The padlocked guitar case (“Open in Emergency Only!”), 4 hours of talking, and accusatory scolding when students want actual instruction — satirising what Philip Hii would later document as Duarte’s teaching reality.

This was the man who appointed himself arbiter of Yepes’s musicianship.

VIII. The South African Context: A Question of Musicianship

Duarte’s geographic dismissal of Johannesburg as culturally peripheral deserves scrutiny. By 1960, South African classical guitarists had access to something London-based guitarists then largely lacked: training in interpretive principles grounded in conservatory tradition.

John Williams’s authorised biographer notes that Williams had “hardly an ideal basis” having to study piano at the Royal College of Music, and that Julian Bream “suffered similar limitations.” Since the guitar wasn’t an institutional subject yet, both had to study piano to obtain tertiary qualifications — a technical exercise in learning a secondary instrument, not an immersion in interpretive pedagogy. As Williams himself later acknowledged, Segovia didn’t teach interpretive principles either; he demanded imitation. This is fundamentally different from the pedagogical lineage Yepes inherited: studies with pupils of Tárrega, followed by work on interpretation with Vicente Asencio, Walter Gieseking, George Enescu, and Nadia Boulanger.

Fritz Buss — who hosted Yepes in Johannesburg and subsequently studied with him in Madrid from 1961 — had, like Williams, learned from his father and, to some extent, other musicians in Cologne, including Hermann Bödicker (a classical guitarist) and Heinz Windorf (a conservatory-trained violinist). Most crucially, between 1945 and 1954, Buss acquired nine years of instruction in the principles of interpretation, under a conservatory-trained conductor, as member of the Ehrenfelder Zupforchester (a plucked string orchestra). His recordings from the late 1950s and early ’60s reveal a musicianship ahead of the London establishment:

[embed]Fritz Buss performs Menuets 5 & 6 from Fernando Sor’s Opus 11. Recorded in Johannesburg in 1957.

[embed]Fritz Buss performs Villa-Lobos’s Prelude no. 1 (excerpt). Recorded in Johannesburg in the late 1950s or early ‘60s.

Compare these to canonical recordings by Segovia and John Williams from the same period. Buss’s phrasing, dynamic control, and (above all) sense of line align with the conservatory training that mainstream classical musicians of the period possessed and guitarists of the Segovia lineage eschewed. Segovia, after all, was an autodidact. Duarte likewise — he held a degree in textile chemistry. Both men, in their different roles, enforced parroting of Segovia’s oddly mannered playing instead of fostering guitarists’ understanding of interpretive principles familiar to mainstream classical musicians.

Moreover, as Lee Goodman, then Chair of the Classical Guitar Society of South Africa, documented in 1976:

“At the time Mr Buss founded this Society, knowledge in this country of the guitar as a classical instrument was extremely limited. Through exhaustive and dedicated work, Mr Buss has brought about a position that today there are many competent players in this country, our concert-going public enthusiastically support guitar recitals, and many international guitarists have expressed their surprise and pleasure at the advanced musical standard that we maintain.”

Buss’s students — notably Simon Wynberg and David Hewitt — continued this tradition into the 1980s, performing at a level that remained (technically and musically) ahead of much of the English guitar scene. The claim that South Africa lacked “points of contact” with serious guitar playing is not just arrogant; it’s factually backwards.

[embed]Buss alumni Simon Wynberg and David Hewitt perform “Grand duo égales et concertantes” by Napoléon Coste (1986 cassette tape).

[embed]Buss alumnus Simon Wynberg performs “Fantasie Variée sur la Romance d’Otello,” op. 7, by Marco Aurelio Zani de Ferranti (1987).

IX. Bad Faith in Print: The Villa-Lobos Contradiction

In December 1978, Duarte reviewed Yepes’s Villa-Lobos album for Gramophone. He wrote:

“[Yepes offers] an accurate account of the surface… none of the rubato that Bream deploys… [and] even his waywardness of tempo is absent.”

In April 1989, Duarte reviewed the identical recording of the Preludes and Etudes —the exact same performances, merely reissued on CD. He wrote:

“[Yepes exhibits] a kind of sentimentality… and note values that are too distorted… marked by slow tempos.”

These claims are mutually exclusive. The same fixed recording cannot simultaneously:

• Be “accurate” (1978) and have “distorted note values” (1989)
• Lack rubato (1978) and exhibit excessive rhythmic freedom/sentimentality (1989)
• Be free of “waywardness of tempo” (1978) and be “marked by slow tempos” that deviate from norms (1989)

This is not a change of opinion. It is proof that the criticism was never grounded in how Yepes actually played. The goalposts moved because the agenda remained constant: Yepes must be wrong (Segovia/London must be right), regardless of what the empirical reality of the record might be.

Consider Duarte’s particular objection to Yepes’s interpretation of Villa-Lobos’s Etude №5 — condemned for its slower tempo compared to Julian Bream’s canonical recording:

[embed]Narciso Yepes — Etude no. 5 by Heitor Villa-Lobos (1971)

A competent music critic evaluates a new interpretation not by how faithfully it clones an existing recording, but by what it reveals about the inherent potential of the work. What does Yepes’s approach illuminate that faster tempos obscure?

Listen for three distinct contrapuntal lines: a relentless ostinato figure in the middle voice that never dissolves into the texture; above it, a treble line; below it, a bass voice. In Yepes’s hands, these three voices remain audibly distinct throughout — none swallowed by the others, none flattened into mere harmonic progression. There is space between them, a sense of depth and dimension.

The slower tempo reveals what the Etude is fundamentally about: a compositional and technical exercise in sustaining three independent parts simultaneously. Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer; the ostinato might evoke a journey down the Amazon — the steady pulse of a raft moving through water, with animal calls and growls from the forest on either bank, panoramic vistas appearing and receding. Whether one hears this specific imagery or not, the interpretation makes audible a purely musical architecture that faster, more rhythmically driven approaches compress into surface glitter.

Bream’s waggish execution is brilliant in its own way — fleet, invigorating. But it serves different expressive ends. A responsible critic would explain what each approach reveals about the music. Duarte’s condemnations — mutually contradictory across two reviews of the same recording — reveal only an agenda: any interpretation that deviated from the London establishment’s template was, by definition, wrong.

X. Why It Matters

By 1982, Thor Eckert Jr. — music critic for The Christian Science Monitor — attended a Yepes recital at Carnegie Hall and wrote:

“Guitar concerts in Carnegie Hall can be a frustrating affair. Narciso Yepes brought his 10-string invention there last Thursday, and suddenly it was not a problem hearing that instrument in that space. His guitar fills the hall with sound. The musician who plucks it is one of the finest in the world today. … One left his recital stimulated and elated, with nary a thought as to the potential limitations of the instrument, dynamically or musically.”

This was more than two decades after the Wigmore debut. Yepes had continued to tour globally, record extensively, and expand the guitar’s repertoire through his 10-string instrument and collaborations with composers. The “clipped” and “thin tone” myths that originated with John W. Duarte persisted in guitar-world discourse (being parroted even in Yepes’s 1997 obituary in The New York Times by Allan Kozinn: “Compared with the more flowing style of his older contemporary, Andrés Segovia… Mr. Yepes’ style could sound oddly clipped”), but they never matched what neutral witnesses heard, or what spectrograms objectively show.

The suppression had consequences beyond one man’s reputation. Yepes’s innovations — his 10-string guitar, his biomechanically and acoustically informed technique, his defense of flexible textualism and interpretive plurality, etc. — were dismissed as gimmicks of an inferior artist. The 10-string instrument, which expanded the guitar and its repertoire in numerous respects, was framed as a crutch rather than an advancement. Composers who wrote for Yepes found their works marginalised within the guitar repertoire and broadcast media. The posture and technique that Yepes demonstrated to Ivor Mairants in 1961 — biomechanically sound, producing what Mairants himself described as “thicker and stronger” tone — were suppressed in favour of the Segovia–Shearer template that doesn’t project and continues to produce repetitive strain injuries in guitarists, while being either ignorantly or dishonestly labelled as “ergonomic.”

When institutional gatekeepers control the narrative, innovation becomes heresy. Yepes’s crime was not incompetence — the evidence proves otherwise. His ‘crime’ was offering an alternative to the established orthodoxy. The machinery deployed against him ensured that generations of guitarists would never seriously consider his approach, his instrument, or the repertoire written for him. They would dismiss these innovations without investigation, having internalised the myths Duarte began to plant in 1955.

The machinery Duarte deployed was not about music. It was about control: who gets to define “great playing,” whose interpretations are canonical, and which artists threaten the established hierarchy.

The pattern mirrors what Segovia orchestrated in his correspondence with Manuel Ponce. In those letters, Segovia refers to Mexican composer Carlos Chávez as “the Traitor” and assures his friend he will see to it that his rival “passes into History” under that label. The mechanism is identical: a perceived threat to status is reframed as inferior, then systematically undermined through coordinated attacks against that Other, plus mutual back-patting amongst members of the Order of the Same.

With this context in mind, it is worth asking: Where did Duarte acquire the narrative that Yepes was an ex-student of Segovia — five years before Yepes’s only documented pedagogical interaction with Segovia, which ended in excommunication? The most plausible source: private discussions with Segovia himself, framing Yepes as a subordinate traitor that should go down in infamy.

Duarte’s explicit 1961 invocation of his “friendship of thirteen years or more” with Segovia, his challenge to Oliver Walker to “ask Segovia for a reference,” and Vladimir Bobri’s immediate endorsement from the American Segovia camp all point in the same direction. The attack on Yepes was not one critic’s idiosyncratic opinion. It was institutional enforcement — and it worked. The myths Duarte planted in 1955 were still being recycled, unchallenged, in Yepes’s 1997 New York Times obituary — and beyond into the new media of the (mis)information age.

Conclusion: What the Evidence Shows

1948–1954: Neutral-to-positive coverage. No “thin tone,” “clipped bass,” “tuning problems,” or “wayward rhythm” tropes exist.

1955: Duarte (as “Discus”) seeds myths: false “pupil of Segovia” claim, imaginary league-table hierarchies, empirically untenable “clipped” and “rather thin tone” claims.

1959: Duarte softens on the ‘reissued’ Aranjuez recording (“warm-blooded”), tacitly dropping “thin tone” without honest retraction.

1960: Twenty recitals in Japan, triumphant South African tour, Lebanon performances, among others. Global demand accelerates. Compostela excommunication: Segovia ejects Yepes from his masterclass for artistic autonomy.

1961: Full house at Wigmore, four encores, overflow crowd five days later at Instituto Cervantes of London. Students travelling from South Africa and Japan to study with Yepes. Duarte’s savage review contradicted by eyewitness Oliver Walker, who describes a “crowded and vociferously enthusiastic hall.”

[Negative reviews continue to flow from the Segovia/Duarte circle; many laudatory ones, also, from neutral critics. Both exceed the scope of the present investigation.]

1978 vs 1989: Duarte condemns the same Villa-Lobos recording for mutually exclusive faults, proving bad faith.

1982: Independent critic at Carnegie Hall reports Yepes “fills the hall with sound.”

The gap between myth and evidence is unbridgeable. The myths persisted not because they were true, but because they served a function: maintaining the boundaries of an orthodoxy that could not tolerate alternative approaches, alternative postures, alternative transcriptions — alternative authority.

Oliver Walker had closed his letter to the editor of B.M.G. with “the old Arab saying: ‘The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.’ Senor Yepes is young enough to have many and greater triumphs ahead as his caravan moves forward and the yelping of the ‘Jack Duartes’ fades in the distance.”

Walker’s prophecy proved accurate. Despite the coordinated attacks, the fabricated myths, the institutional gatekeeping — Yepes continued. The machinery of suppression failed to stop him, though it succeeded in obscuring what he represented: proof that alternative approaches and different paths to excellence are possible.

Yepes represented what Segovia’s empire could not absorb: an artist who studied with pupils of Francisco Tárrega and legendary non-guitarist musicians like Nadia Boulanger, who collaborated with progressive composers, who filled Carnegie Hall without apology, and who answered “I need not copy Segovia” when pressed to conform.

The machinery deployed against him — nonsensical league tables, canonical policing, geographic dismissals, unnamed (fabricated?) corroborators, authority through proximity — was never about the music. It was about preserving a hierarchy in which only one kind of playing, one lineage, one Authority could be legitimate.

The evidence shows otherwise.

Following Duarte’s death in 2004, the guitar establishment mobilised to protect his legacy — and their own, as those who benefitted from his machinations. Soundboard magazine published a 24-page tribute in 2006. Contributors included, among others, Albert F. Kunze, Sharon Isbin, and Graham Wade. The word “honest” appeared repeatedly: Eleftheria Kotzia praised “his honesty.” Jim Skinger emphasised “deeply and honestly held convictions.” Editor Richard M. Long insisted Duarte “believed that honesty is essential to the credibility of a reviewer” and that “young artists … once smarted from his blunt opinions … later became good friends and expressed appreciation for his honesty.”

When a tribute must insist — and insist again, and again, and again — that its subject was “honest,” one recalls Oliver Walker’s reference to Hamlet (III.ii) decades earlier: The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

The pattern is established. Philip Hii documented lessons consisting of gossip rather than instruction, a ‘teacher’ who couldn’t play his own instrument, vindictive letters threatening deportation. Spectrographic analysis disproves Duarte’s core acoustic claims against Yepes. His reviews of the same recording contradict each other, revealing bad faith. The same goes for criticisms made in error, then quietly abandoned without public retraction — or doubled down upon. He fabricated a “pupil of Segovia” narrative five years before Yepes’s Compostela excommunication. He invoked unnamed corroborators he refused to identify. He attacked a professional critic’s credentials for repudiating his 1961 censure of a top artist.

Walker’s assessment had been precise: Duarte’s “bilious dissection seemed to [b]e animated largely by envy, frustration, pettiness and plain jealousy.”

Read the follow-up to this article, “The Machinery of Suppression (Part II): A Real-Time Demonstration,” here.

Further listening:

As final exhibit, here is a live tape recording of similar vintage and programme to Yepes’s 1961 Wigmore Hall debut — his August 1962 recital at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Judge for yourself, bearing in mind that this is a damaged archival recording of a live concert (with tape flutter and other forms of distortion), not a pristine studio recording.

[embed]Narciso Yepes (6-string guitar) recital at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, August 1962.

PROGRAMME:

Alonso Mudarra (c. 1510–1580), trans. Yepes [0:00:17] Fantasía X “que contrahaze la harpa en la manera de Ludovico”

Gaspar Sanz (c. 1640–1710), trans. Yepes “Suite española” [0:05:27] Españoletas [0:06:45] Gallarda y villano [0:07:37] Danza de las hachas [0:08:17] Rujero y paradetas [0:09:24] Zarabanda al ayre español [0:10:17] Passacalle [0:12:00] La miñona de Cataluña [0:13:13] Canarios

Mauro Giuliani (1781–1829), ed. Scheit Sonata, op. 15 [0:16:39] Allegro spiritoso [0:24:49] Adagio con espressione [0:29:40] Allegro vivace

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), trans. Yepes [0:32:31] Ciaccona BWV 1004

INTERVAL

Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986) Cavatina (1950, written for Andrés Segovia) [0:47:13] Preludio [0:52:21] Sarabande [0:55:40] Scherzino [0:58:14] Barcarole [1:02:11] Danza pomposa

Gerardo Gombau (1906–1971) from “Trez piezas de la Bella Epoca” (1959, written for Yepes) [1:05:21] Antillana [1:07:48] Marcha jocosa

Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909), trans. Yepes [1:10:15] Rumores de la caleta

Antonio Ruiz-Pipó (1934–1997) Canción y danza no. 1 (1956, written for Yepes) [1:14:21] Canción [1:16:30] Danza

ENCORES:

José Muñoz Molleda (1905–1988), trans. Yepes [1:19:50] Farruca

Emilio Pujol (1886–1980) [1:24:17] El abejorro

Manuel de Falla (1876–1946), trans. Yepes [1:27:19] Danza del molinero

Francisco Tárrega (1852–1909) [1:33:06] Improvisación ¡A Granada! Cantiga árabe (Andantino) a.k.a. “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”

Narciso Yepes at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, August 1962.