Blind from the age of three as a result of diphtheria, Joaquín Rodrigo studied composition in Valencia before moving to Paris in 1927 to study with Paul Dukas. While there, he met both his fellow countryman Manuel de Falla and the Turkish pianist Victoria Kamhi, who would become Señora Rodrigo. Joaquín and Victoria honeymooned in Spain but eventually returned to Paris, where during the bitterly cold winter of 1938-1939, with war looming, Victoria learned she was pregnant. Seven months into the pregnancy Victoria miscarried and was hospitalized for several days. During this time a family friend who was staying at their apartment observed that Joaquín spent entire nights sitting at the piano, playing a melody so sad that it gave her chills. Evoking the saeta, a song performed by women from their balconies during religious processions through the streets of Seville, this tune would form the basis for the slow movement of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.
Returning home to find an empty cradle still sitting in her apartment, Victoria was forced to sell her beloved piano to pay her medical bills. Not long afterward, Rodrigo received a letter from de Falla, offering him a teaching position in Madrid. Victoria and Joaquín quickly packed their entire belongings—including the completed manuscript for the Concierto de Aranjuez—into a pair of suitcases and left immediately. Two days after they crossed the border into Spain, World War II broke out.
Their fortunes improved in Madrid, where by November 1940 they celebrated the arrival of their first child and the successful premiere of the Concierto de Aranjuez, which before long would become not only Rodrigo’s best-known work but also the most famous guitar concerto ever written. Surrounding the central Adagio are two genteel courtly dances, the first in a characteristically Spanish meter that blurs the distinction between 6/8 and 3/4. Rodrigo wrote that the work takes its name “the famous royal residence on the banks of the Tajo, not far from Madrid and the Andalusian highway, and in its notes one may fancy seeing the ghost of Goya, held in thrall by melancholy—in its themes there lingers the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds, and the gushing of fountains.”