1886 Antonio de Torres "SE 92" w/pegs SP/CY

This 1886 Antonio de Torres is a small spruce and cypress guitar with wooden pegs, numbered SE 92 – a second-epoch Torres from Almería, once part of the Hosokawa collection in Japan.

In the video above, Alan Mearns plays Frédéric Chopin's Mazurka Op. 17, No. 4 on this guitar.

SE 92: A Small Torres with Pegs

Built during Torres' second epoch, this guitar is numbered SE 92 on the label by its maker – very faint, but still (barely) legible next to the printed "Calle Real, número 23 ... Segunda Época". A very small guitar in size and proportions, with wooden tuning pegs, it still boasts a huge, rich and simply gorgeous quality of sound.

Construction, as Described by Romanillos

José Romanillos lists SE 92 in his book on Torres and notes that it is similar to SE 117. The soundboard is made of three pieces of spruce, braced with five radial struts and two diagonal ones. The rosette is made of circles of dark and light strips, the fingerboard is ebony and the bridge rosewood, and the back and sides are two-piece cypress.

Sound and Playability

How rich and harmonious the sound is, how perfectly balanced the notes are as they blend, how the guitar feels as it vibrates against you – with every Torres we've seen, words still fall short. Here the trebles are velvety and multi-dimensional and respond to the slightest change in the right hand, for a wide palette of color and expression, and the basses are deep and sonorous, with great lyrical charm. Again, it is a smaller guitar, but it plays with great ease in the hands of any player, thanks in part to its startling responsiveness. Cypress makes it a versatile instrument too, as happy with classical repertoire as with flamenco.

Condition

The guitar has some repairs as well as refinishing work that was done several decades ago, likely in Japan when it was part of the Hosokawa collection, and to this day everything remains perfectly intact and currently in no need of any work.

More on Antonio de Torres

To learn more about the master of Seville and Almería, read our Antonio de Torres biography, The Torres Sound – an excerpt from José Luis Romanillos's book "Antonio de Torres" – and Pepe Romero on Torres, his interview with Kenny Hill. Also see Orfeo Magazine #9 – The 200th Anniversary of Antonio de Torres.

GSI Foundation

This guitar was donated to our non-profit charitable organization, the GSI Foundation. Guitar sales through the GSI Foundation raise money to directly benefit music education in public schools.

Antonio de Torres: The Stradivari of the Guitar

The name of Antonio de Torres (1817–1892) is to guitarists what the name of Antonio Stradivari is to violinists. Taken as a whole, the corpus of instruments made by this legendary maker's hand is today regarded as the foundational basis of the modern guitar. The impact that these guitars made on successive generations of luthiers is impossible to exaggerate – still to this day, most or nearly all of Torres' structural and tonal improvements are in use by all top contemporary builders.

The First and Second Epochs: Seville and Almería

Torres built his first great guitars in Seville, from the 1850s to about 1870 – his "first epoch", when his labels read "Calle de la Cerrajería, número 32". After some years away from the bench he took up guitar making again in his native Almería in 1875, and from then until his death in 1892 his labels say "Segunda Época", usually with the guitar's number written in by hand. In his biography of the maker, José Luis Romanillos catalogued the surviving instruments by these two periods, which is why Torres guitars are known today by numbers such as "FE 17" (first epoch) or "SE 114" (second epoch).

Played by Tárrega – and by Today's Artists

In Torres' own day, the leading players such as Julián Arcas and Francisco Tárrega were already performing on his masterpieces, and successive generations of players over the 20th century continued to play them. Although increasing values over the past several decades have placed them largely within the sphere of collectors, they are still highly desirable to leading professional players and occasionally make their way into the recording studio or even the concert stage. Pepe Romero, Stefano Grondona, Wulfin Lieske and Marc Teicholz, among others, have brought them to life in recorded and live sound, and we all hope this trend continues in the future, especially as more Torres instruments come to the public's attention.