Numerous innovations have been attributed to Torres over the years, from fan-strutting to the use of mechanical machine heads, but Torres' real genius was to find the most important developments of the day, improve them and bring them together. In doing so, he created an instrument of a 'rightness' that has never been seriously questioned.

The most fundamental thing Torres did was to increase the size of the body. Torres' concert guitars, introduced in the early 1850s, have soundboards about 20 per cent larger than those of the concert guitars played by Fernando Sor and Dionisio Aguado a few years earlier. The extra area is in both upper and lower bouts, giving his plantilla the figure-of-eight form we now take for granted. Some claim Torres arrived at this shape geometrically. His descendants, according to Romanillos, claim it was based on the figure of a young woman he saw in Seville. Torres' bridges were another step forward: from about 1857, he used a separate saddle, permitting minute adjustment of string height.

Torres knew that lightness was essential in the vibrating surface of an instrument. But a large soundboard, though potentially louder, is heavier than a small one. Making it thinner to reduce its weight would make it weak and flexible, with unfortunate effects on the sound. The solution lay in building a soundboard that was 'domed', arched in both directions, over an arrangement of wooden struts. These famous fan-struts would ensure the static strength of the tapa, the soundboard, while letting it respond to the vibrations of the strings.

The system's efficacy was proved by Torres' experimental guitar, built in 1862, with papier-mache sides and back. It is no longer playable, but those who heard it accepted its maker's contention - confirmed by modern physicists - that only the top of a guitar is of real importance in determining the character of its sound.

Machine heads were not quite new when Torres used them, in 1856, but they were not common in Spain. A more important choice, however, was an aesthetic one. Torres insisted that guitars intended for serious music should have only subtle decoration. Previously the guitar had been both a musical instrument and an item of furniture. Even the vibrating soundboards of 18th and early 19th century guitars were loaded with inlays and marquetry work. With the exception of the elaborately inlaid instrument with which he won his bronze medal in 1858, most of the guitars built by Torres were austere in decoration: it was certainly kept away from the functional parts of the instrument.

Torres does not seem actually to have invented much, except possibly the tornavoz, a steel cylinder of the same diameter as the soundhole and extending it back into the body, intended to give the guitar added projection. Certainly, 'La Leona' is the earliest surviving guitar by any maker to use the device. Torres used it often during his first period of guitar making, then abandoned it. His followers took it up, but by the end of World War II it was forgotten.

The effects of Torres' work were immediate and obvious. The new posture recommended by Tarrega, with the left leg raised to support the guitar, depended upon the broader Torres instrument. It gave players the stability they had craved since the days of Dionisio Aguado's tripod, and facilitated more complex music at higher positions on the neck. At the same time, the louder, fuller sound of the Torres guitar permitted a wider range of dynamics and musical expression. Small wonder that the Torres guitar was almost seen as a new instrument.

Tarrega wrote no method, but his teachings were faithfully handed on to the next century by his pupil Emilio Pujol (1886-1980). In his introduction to Pujol's Escuela Razonada de la Guitarra (Rational Method for the Guitar), the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla wrote: "It is a marvelous instrument, as austere as it is rich in sound, and which now powerfully, now gently, takes possession of the soul. It concentrates within itself the essential values of many noble instruments of the past, and has acquired these values as a great inheritance without losing those native qualities which it owes, through its origin, to the people themselves." It is difficult to imagine anyone writing those words if it had not been for Torres.

Adapted from: John Morrish