Since almost before his death Francisco Tárrega became a symbol among his disciples. It is true he was an excellent guitarist and maestro (i.e., teacher), but many achievements for guitar were not only his, and his pupils were ever ready to believe anything good about guitar was the sole merit of their master. It is the fault of -mainly- Emilio Pujol, who did not hesitate to surrogate to his master those merits which were totally his, Pujol's.
Francisco Tárrega did not leave a manual to
learn to play his instrument, though he had planned to do so,
according to his disciples. He only left us some exercises and
studies written by him. He also used some studies written
originally by other people. The custom of signing the copy one
made by hand of somebody else's music is very old, in fact it
dates back from the codices in the Middle Ages. So, we could
scarcely regard this custom as present day piracy, but as a
cheap way to assert one's ownership on a sheet of paper in a
time when even paper was a rare commodity. If we add ignorance
about the true authorship of a given musical fragment, we could
explain -of course, never excuse- that Tarrega's pupils
published their master's papers as his. So, it happened that the
guitar researcher and scholar Matanya Ophee 
found out that the famous Study
on a theme by Fossa, attibuted
to Tárrega by mistake, really belonged to the French
guitarist François de Fossa, being exactly the second variation
on the famous theme Folías
de España, which many other composers, like Fernando
Sor, had already varied. It goes without saying that
Francisco Tárrega can't be held responsible for that lie, but
his pupils, who attributed it to their maestro partly because of
their sheer ignorance, partly out of admiration. Also, in that
Spain nobody knew about other guitarists but the Spanish ones,
and not all of them. However, we know now about the success of
many other guitarists, like Giulio
Regondi, the Polish Marek Sokolowski and Stanislaw
Szczepanowski (who apparently had written the now lost tremolo Remembrances
of Andalousie when visiting Spain together with Franz
Liszt and Gottschalk), the Swiss Leonard Schultz, the Italian
Luigi Mozzani, the Russian Nikolai Petrovitch Makarov and the
Czech Johan Caspar Mertz.
Notwithstanding this, the music by Francisco Tárrega shines on itself. Let's listen to it under a new light, not a god's light, but that of a good man, a prolific author and excellent guitarist.
Cambrils (Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain),
Septembre, 3rd 1999
Jesuo de las Heras