Julian Bream died on August 14th

ALMOST AS SOON as he started his long love affair with the guitar, Julian Bream was aware he was doing something disreputable. When he was caught as a teenager practising Bach in the Royal College of Music, he was warned not to bring that instrument into the building again. It lowered the tone. Signing on to do his National Service in an army band, he was told he could play piano and cello, fine, but the guitar only “occasionally”. Audiences clapped long and hard when he performed in the Wigmore Hall at 18, in 1951, but as he toured round Britain in the mid-1950s, sleeping in his Austin van to save on hotels, not many came to hear him. The guitar was not a proper instrument, somehow. Its voice was too soft to carry over an orchestra. The electric version was for pumped-up rock ’n’ rollers, the non-electric for holidays in Spain. And from Spain, the spiritual and historical home of the guitar, came the loudest scorn of all. An Englishman playing a guitar, said one virtuoso, was a kind of blasphemy.