Kristina Varlid plays Lágrima by Francisco Tárrega on a Hermann Hauser II from 1956. Barely two minutes of music on an instrument that has had seventy years to settle — the combination is as exposed as the guitar repertoire gets.
About Lágrima
Lágrima — "teardrop" — is one of the shortest pieces in the standard repertoire and one of the hardest to play well. There is no virtuosity to hide behind: a simple melody in E major, a darker middle section in E minor, and a return. Everything depends on voicing, on how the melody is lifted above the accompaniment, and on a rubato that must sound inevitable rather than applied. Students learn it early; players keep it for life.
If you want to work on it yourself, our step-by-step guide to Lágrima goes through the piece bar by bar.
The piece also says something about how Tárrega wrote. He did not reach for effect. The shape of the melody and the spacing of the chords do the work, and the result is music that sounds improvised while being tightly controlled on the page. That is why it survives so many different readings: there is room in it for a player to decide what the piece is about.
About Francisco Tárrega
Tárrega stands at the point where the modern classical guitar begins. His own compositions are mostly small in scale, but his transcriptions, his teaching and his technical thinking shaped what the instrument became in the twentieth century. Our portrait of Francisco Tárrega traces that influence, and Recuerdos de la Alhambra shows the other side of his writing.
The Guitar
The Hermann Hauser II No. 577 from 1956 has a spruce top and French polish on body and soundboard, a 645 mm scale, a 51 mm nut and Landstorfer tuners — and at 1,440 grams it is remarkably light. Hermann Hauser II took over the family workshop in 1952, and from that year his instruments carried his own signature. He refined his father's designs in close exchange with the players who used them, a line that continues today with Hermann Hauser III and Kathrin Hauser. Our article on the Hauser family follows three generations of that workshop.
Watch the Performance
You can hear Kristina Varlid in contrasting repertoire in our article on her performance of Balada by Martín Fierro, and find more in our overview of famous classical guitar pieces.
