Pedro Ximénez Abrill Tirado

1784–1846

Minuets

Pedro Ximénez Abrill Tirado, born in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, served for some time as chapel master at the cathedral there. He also seems to have worked for a period in Lima before being appointed in 1833 as maestro de capilla at the cathedral of Sucre, then the capital of Bolivia, where he lived until his death.
Almost all of his roughly 600 compositions — including 40 symphonies, around 50 masses, chamber music, songs, piano works and other pieces — disappeared after his death and only came to light again by chance in 2004. During his lifetime very little of his music had been printed. An important exception was the ten-volume Colección de 100 Minués for guitar, published in Paris in 1844, which suggests that Ximénez was himself a highly accomplished guitarist. Not only do the pieces themselves point in that direction, but so does the account given by the English traveller L. Hugh de Bonelli, who described his encounter with the musician in his book Travels in Bolivia (1854):

The chapel-master, or director of the music, is one of the most refined and polished composers of the old sonata and rondo school, and, at the same time, a first-rate performer on the violoncello. His power in execution is as great as his taste as a composer, and this is evi[de]nced by the exquisite melodies which he draws forth from that elegant instrument, the Spanish guitar. The musical gems to which his genius has given birth, are sufficient to immortalize his name: many of them have found their way into Europe, and have drawn from the great Spohr the tribute of his unqualified approbation.

Yet even these printed editions gradually disappeared, and with them the knowledge of this music, which ranks among the finest works written for the guitar in the early nineteenth century. Only in 2015 was the complete collection of the one hundred minuets published again.
The term “minuet” is somewhat misleading, although the pieces do in fact follow the traditional form of the minuet throughout — with one not unimportant qualification: Ximénez’s minuets dispense with a trio and thus with the sense of closure normally created by the returning da capo in a three-part design. They can therefore become something quite different from what their title might suggest. They are neither galant dances for a courtly ball nor plain little pieces for domestic music-making, but lyrical character pieces in a somewhat belated Empfindsam style, as if telling stories.
I perform a larger selection of these minuets as a cycle of “songs without words” on a guitar built around 1840 in London by a French guitar maker (either Joseph Gérard or Charles Boullangier).

Andreas Grün