Music of the Heart

When I was young my father taught me flamenco guitar. Now I yearned to be part of that world again

- Lavinia Spalding

I’ve been in Spain only two days, and already my fingers hurt. It’s a prickly sting, like when a fallen-asleep limb returns to life. The sensation delights me. It means I’m doing something right.

Yesterday, after arriving in Madrid, I took the Metro to the Delicias neighbourhood, walked to a non-descript apartment building and knocked on a stranger’s door. A thin, soft-spoken woman invited me in and handed me a $3,000 guitar. “Can you play something?” she asked.

This was the reason I’d come to Spain. Because I once believed I was destined to be a tocaora.

Forty-five years ago, when I was two, my father also came to Madrid and knocked on strangers’ doors. A renowned classical guitarist, he was enamoured of flamenco, and in Spain he learnt from anyone willing to teach him. He approached performers in bars, befriended buskers on sidewalks and somehow—no one in my family knows how—managed to study with Paco de Lucía, the greatest flamenco guitarist of our time.

I started playing classical guitar when I was five. Every afternoon at our home in the US state of New Hampshire, I practised while my father instructed and critiqued. I played scales till my fingertips stung and peeled and became calloused, and by age seven, I was called a child prodigy. I attended master classes—always the youngest student by a decade. Sometimes I performed with my father.