Among English people of Shelley's generation, war in Spain made the guitar (well, the "Spanish guitar," to be distinguished from an archaic instrument called the "English guitar," or "gittern") more visible in London, and the talk of the town. The chaos of the Peninsular War (1808-14), between Napoleon and Spanish royalists, sent a lot of Spanish refugees into exile in London.[i]  Some critics thought that Spanish guitars endangered English women. Elizabeth Isabella Spence’s conduct novella The Spanish Guitar, a Tale (1814) accuses the Spanish guitar of enticing young women to abandon their families, homes, and good conduct. It is a “selfish solitary enjoyment, from which no one could experience benefit or advantage” (49).

Fernando Sor with one of his Spanish guitars

In the following year, 1815, this view of the guitar was complicated by the London career of the Catalán musician and composer Fernando Sor (1778-1839).  Originally from Barcelona, Sor pursued French Enlightenment ideas, contributing an opera to the tradition of adaptations of Fenelon’s ‘mirror of princes’ Télémaque, but also sung Spanish “patriotic songs” and protested Napoleonic rule by singing and playing in patriotic protest bands.[iv] Then, in 1813, when the Spanish War of Independence drove the Napoleonic regime out of Spain, Sor was labelled an afrancescado, or French-aligned traitor to Spain. “In 1974, more than a century and a half” after the War of Independence, recalls Sor’s Anglophone biographer Brian Jeffery, “an archivist in Spain even put obstacles in my way because Sor had been an afrancescado.”[v] Sor worked in Paris, then, in 1815, came to London, playing guitar in public concerts at prestigious venues, giving lessons, and even performing before the family of the Prince Regent.

(listen here to one of Sor's guitar compositions.)

As guitar historian Christopher Page argues, Sor “exploited the romance of the guitar to create a more deeply considered music for that instrument than anyone in his London audiences had ever known.”[vii] That development--a crucial origin for guitar-led British rock music--began in Barcelona.

[i] James Westbrook, “Louis Panormo: ‘The Only Maker of Guitars in the Spanish Style.’” Early Music 42, no. 4 (2013): 572-584, p. 571.

[ii]  “Cheltenham.” The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor 13 (December 1813): 481-4, p. 483.

[iii] Elizabeth Isabella Spence, The Spanish Guitar: A Tale, for the Use of Young Persons (London: William McDowall, 1814), 42-3. Additional citations are inline in parentheses.

[iv] Brian Jeffery, Fernando Sor, Composer and Guitarist (London: Tecla Editions, 1977), 21.

[v] Jeffery, Fernando Sor, 21

[vi] Christopher Page, “New light on the London years of Fernando Sor, 1815-1822,” Early Music 41, no. 4 (2013), 557-569, p. 559.

[vii] Page, “New light,” 567.