There is an apparent anomaly regarding the date of composition of Roussel's Segovia, Op. 29. The catalogues of Roussel's works give the date of composition as April, 1925, with a premiere that same month in Madrid. Yet Andres Segovia, the dedicatee of the piece wrote a letter dated 1923 in which he mentions that he already has Roussel's piece. Which is right?

Reader Allan Jones of the UK (who originally drew my attention to Segovia's letter) responds to this puzzle with a wealth of detail and logic:

When it comes to the guitar, you have to bear in mind that standards of scholarship are lower than in the general run of music. Even now there isn't a really good book on the instrument, its repertoire and its performers. There's quite a lot of inconsistency among the sources I've consulted. There seems to be consensus, however, on two points:

1. Segovia played his Paris debut in 1924. Prior to that date, his concert-giving appears to have been confined to Spain and Latin America.
2. In the audience at the Paris debut were several composers, including Roussel.

The book that raised the date question in my mind is "The Segovia-Ponce Letters" (Editions Orphee, 1989). The very first letter in this collection is from Segovia to Ponce, and Segovia reports that he has Roussel's piece (he doesn't say he has performed it). It is dated 1923 (i.e. the year before the Paris debut, and two years before the composition date usually given). However, there's an editorial footnote saying "This letter is typed with the date written by hand in ink." There's no indication of whose hand has added the date.

Certain features of this letter make me suspicious of this date of 1923. Segovia says in the letter that he has been promised a piece by Ravel, and I'm dubious of Ravel (and Roussel) knowing anything about Segovia prior to the 1924 debut. (Segovia also mentions other non-Hispanic composers - of whom the most improbable is Schoenberg - as being keen to write for him. How these composers could have known of him is unclear, but of course that doesn't mean they couldn't have known about him.)

Another anomaly concerning this letter is the address. It was sent from the Hotel Beaulieu, Rue Balzac, Paris. If the date is true, what was Segovia doing in Paris a year before his debut? A holiday, perhaps? Another possibility might be: commissioning French composers to write something for his debut the following year.

This is not a speculation I take seriously (Segovia was notoriously averse to the modernism of 1920s Paris). But it would at least be consistent with Harvey Turnbull's claim ("The Guitar", 1974, p. 112) that Segovia played Roussel's piece at his Paris debut. No other source duplicates this claim. Rather, they hint that Roussel composed the piece as a result of hearing Segovia in Paris in 1924.

However, none of these anomalies could be said to prove the letter couldn't have been written in 1923.

If, for the sake of argument, the letter wasn't written in 1923, when was it written? One possibility might be just before or just after Segovia's Paris debut. However, Segovia makes no mention of his concert giving, which seems most improbable. Another possibility would be that it was written some time well after the debut, maybe on a return trip to the city. If so, my hunch would be early 1925, some time before the date given by Robert Follet ('Albert Roussel: A Bio-bibliography', Greenwood Press, 1988) for the premiere of Roussel's piece (April 1925, in Madrid).

As a first step to clearing up this question, someone ought, at the very least, to dig out reviews of Segovia's Paris debut to see what he actually played. Maybe I'll do that myself one day!

I thank Mr. Jones profusely for such a well-reasoned reply.

I would like to add that even if Segovia's letter is dated incorrectly, the dates given in the Roussel catalogs (i.e., composing the work in April with a premiere later that same month) seem suspicious as well, for a couple of reasons.

The work premiered on the April 25. It would have required copying, travelling from Normandy to Madrid, rehearsal time, scheduling into a performance, etc., to mention some of the most obvious delays. This doesn't leave very much of April for Roussel to have composed the piece. He was a meticulous worker; to produce a work ready for performance in an extremely short time would have been unusual.

I would speculate that the manuscript was dated April, 1925, but that the bulk of the composition was done prior to that time; sometime between Segovia's 1924 concert, mentioned by Mr. Jones, and the premiere in April, 1925.