Review: The Guitar of Andres Segovia Hermann Hauser 1937

Reviewed by Tom Harper

Originally published in American Lutherie #83, 2005 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume Seven, 2015



The Guitar of Andrés Segovia Hermann Hauser 1937
Liner notes by Richard Bruné and Don Pilarz
Produced by Dynamic S.r.l., Genova, Italy
Dynamic catalog number CDS 433

Wouldn’t it be great to have in one source working drawings, textual explanations, photographs, and recordings of one of the most important instruments ever built? Dynamic’s offering does exactly this. Richard Bruné, Don Pilarz, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art collaborated to create a definitive description of Andrés Segovia’s famous 1937 Hauser guitar. The result is a boxed set containing a multilingual pamphlet (Italian, English, German, and French), three sheets of full-scale working drawings, a full-length audio CD of Segovia playing the instrument, and a poster. All this fits into a box that is about 6" × 9" × 3/4".

The pamphlet describes Segovia’s challenges to establish the guitar as a serious classical instrument, the requirements for the instrument, technical details about it, and its physical state. One also gets a sense of Hermann Hauser as a builder. It is clear that he did not create great instruments by accident or luck. There are also almost thirty color photographs that display important details of the outside and inside of the instrument that are very useful to a builder wanting to create a Hauser-style instrument. The writing is clear and concise and provides construction details that I have not seen elsewhere.