Description

Manuel Ponce, Prélude “Silvius Leopold Weiss”

For Solo Guitar

• Reconstructed and Edited by Johaness Klier

• Standard Notation

• 8 Pages

For many decades the provenance of Manuel Ponce’s Prélude “Silvius Leopold Weiss” was obscure. We know only that the guitar piece repeatedly showed up in Andrés Segovia’s repertoire from 1931/32, mentioned as having been composed by the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750). Only in the mid 1980s was there solid evidence that this attribution was incorrect, that in fact Manuel Ponce had composed the Prélude for Andrés Segovia.

Although the Prélude has for decades been one of the best known and most popular of Ponce’s works for guitar solo, it was not published by the Schott publishing house in Segovia’s “Guitar Archives”. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, the original manuscript of the initial version in Andrés Segovia’s possession was reportedly lost, together with many of his other manuscripts, when his Barcelona apartment was plundered during the early days of the Spanish Civil War.

Schott-Music is now presenting for the first time this famous guitar-piece of 1931 in a sound reconstruction in their ”Gitarren-Archiv” (Guitar Archives) founded in the 1920s. Since the autograph of the solo piece is no longer extant I have reconstructed a plausible version which is convincingly close to the original version of Ponce by taking into account a synopsis of the available sources.

Since there was unfortunately not enough space available to incorporate the whole story of this remarkable guitar composition into the edition I limited myself to the essential facts. Yet my Essay Das Prélude “Silvius Leopold Weiss” von Manuel María Ponce – Hintergründe zur Entstehungsgeschichte, Rekonstruktion und Analysen (Background regarding the genesis, reconstruction and analysis) is offering you the detailed history of this piece, explanations regarding its reconstruction and a musical analysis. The Essay is currently available free of charge at, Das Prélude “Silvius Leopold Weiss“