Agustin Barrios International Guitar Competition

Agustin barrios

Agustin Barrios Mangoré Agustín Pío Barrios was born in southern Paraguay in the Misiones district on May 5, 1885 into a large family where music, literature and drama were held in high esteem.
Though he completed only two years of high school, Barrios was one of those naturally gifted beings who could draw, play music and write poetry with uncommon ability. He was fortunate in that he studied guitar with a formally schooled Paraguayan guitarist who had lived in Buenos Aires, Gustavo Sosa Escalada (1877-1943), who taught young Barrios the Sor and Aguado guitar methods. When he was 25 years old, Barrios left his native Paraguay and journeyed to Buenos Aires, Argentina. From 1910 till 1930 he lived in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, earning his living as a concert guitarist. He never returned to his native Paraguay except for a few extended visits during the mid 1920s. He was constantly on the move and eventually visited 18 Latin American countries. For this reason, he is considered a true pioneer of the concert guitar in Iberoamerica and certainly the first genuinely Pan-American concert artist.
From 1930 till 1934 he changed his name and manner of presentation, becoming “Chief Nitsuga Mangoré, the Pagannini of the Guitar from the jungles of Paraguay”. During the last years of his life he reconciled this stage identity with his given name, calling himself Agustín Barrios Mangoré. Barrios was a gifted virtuoso of the guitar and a talented composer—a potent combination that resulted in the creation of compositions that are considered by many to be the best works ever written for the instrument. The majority of his music he left either in the form of handwritten manuscripts dispersed throughout Latin America or on the numerous 78 rpm recordings he did from 1914 to 1929.
The manuscripts and the recordings are the principal sources for his music (he formally published only nine works). In 1935 Barrios lived in Germany, but returned to South America the following year. Sadly, he never achieved the success that he deserved and he died in 1944 at the age of 59 in the Central American nation of El Salvador, in humble circumstances and forgotten. Barrios’ music is eclectic, drawing from classical, popular and folkoric sources. He admired all the great classi- cal composers, with particular predilection for Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. A gifted virtuoso, his technical facility combined with his creative talent enabled him to compose works with memorable, appealing melodies, rich in harmonic content with frequent modulation to neighboring keys, displaying a singular approach to the voicing of chords in a variety of musical forms.

Richard Stover


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Barrios competition