La Leona

Classic living example = the 1856 Sevilla guitar Romanillos catalogues as FE 04, the one Classical Guitar, the English Wikipedia inventory, Erhard Hannen, and Wulfin Lieske treat as La Leona. Joaquín Pierre does not grant that identification. YAML introduced: 1856 is the year on that label, not the year Torres started, and not a catalog model. FE 17 (1864), SE 114 (1888), FE 08 (1858), and SE 116 are other Torres guitars. A Jellinghaus or a Darío García with this nickname is a new guitar. Standalone. No Gibson SKUs. Original figures above are millimetres and grams only. Do not convert. Do not average 649 with a spoken 650, or 1,200 g with a replica’s 1,225 g.

Construction

The job was a guitar you could hear across a room. Around 1850, the German Wikipedia says, Julián Arcas came to Antonio de Torres Jurado in Seville and asked for one. The English Wikipedia: born in Almería on 13 June 1817, a carpenter’s apprentice at twelve, dead there on 19 November 1892; he may have worked for José Pernas in Granada around 1842; he made some guitars in the 1840s; the profession, on Arcas’s advice, is the 1850s. Who taught him is still that page’s debate.

The label, as the German Wikipedia quotes it: “Por D. Antonio de Torres. Sevilla calle de Cerrageria núm. 32. AÑO DE 1856.” That is the introduced year. A label, not a catalog, and not the year he started. The English Wikipedia puts an earlier shop at Calle de Cerrajería No. 7, shared with Manuel Soto y Solares. 7 and 32 both stand.

FE 04 is José L. Romanillos’s catalogue number, not a serial Torres stamped. The English Wikipedia: he never signed his guitars, and he numbered only the second epoch. Classical Guitar (Kathleen A. Bergeron, Spring 2017): the first epoch runs 1852 to the early 1870s, then a short retirement; the second began in 1875. The English Wikipedia’s window is Sevilla 1852–1870 and Almería 1871–1893 — the shop closed about 1870, a china shop on the Calle Real, the second epoch “about five years” later. Keep 1871 and 1875. The German Wikipedia calls FE 04 the fourth guitar he built. That reads the catalogue as a birth order. Pepe Romero’s FE 03 is also dated 1856.

What he was testing was the top. The English Wikipedia: a larger body, a thinner lighter soundboard, arched both ways, fan braces set symmetrically inside two isosceles triangles joined at their base. He did not invent the fan. That article credits him with the symmetrical layout. The German Wikipedia, citing Franz Jahnel: the fan is Pagés’s; five fans on his plain guitars; on guitars like La Leona, seven centered spruce fans and two V-shaped closing bars. “Like” is as far as that sentence goes. It is not a count taken with the back off.

On this top, Saucier, reading Romanillos, is specific. The lower harmonic bar floats. It is anchored to the sides, just above continuous linings, not glued to the soundboard, so the radial fans run up toward the soundhole. His more usual lining was kerfed. The outer fans meet the lower diagonal cutoff bars. The inner fans stop around the bridge. Romanillos puts the convergence between the eighth and ninth frets, against the fourteenth or fifteenth on SE 114 and FE 17. No transverse bar between the heel block and the harmonic bar. Two bars on the back. Wooden props between the tornavoz and the back are easy to shift, so Saucier will not say Torres fitted them.

The tornavoz is a metal cone under the hole. Copper alloy, brass or bronze, is the German Wikipedia’s wording. Romanillos, via Saucier, calls this the earliest known surviving Torres example. Guitar Salon’s page for a Darío García copy says the first he built. Earliest surviving is not first. Romanillos’s general cone sizes, and the measured cone on FE 24, belong to other guitars. The cone hides the fan. You do not see the bracing through the hole. In 2008, the German Wikipedia says, Helmut Balk had Helga Haritz X-ray the guitar at the Fraunhofer center in Fürth, and the Greifenberger Institute examined the build. No figure from that session is printed in the sources used here.

The letter and the catalogue do not describe one unchanged guitar. Juan Martínez Sirvent’s letter, as Emilio Pujol prints it and Saucier quotes it: cypress back and sides, a cedar neck, an ebony board, machine heads, a bled-spruce top (tapa de pinabete sangrado), simple binding, a tornavoz, and he called it La Leona. Romanillos: two pieces of spruce that do not match, a rosewood board and bridge, rosewood strips in the three-piece cypress back, and a rosewood head veneer that may date from pegs being swapped for machines. Sirvent said machines. Don’t pick ebony or rosewood. Don’t pick pegs or machines for 1856.

He kept it, and he left it bare. Saucier: unfinished while it was his; polish came in later repairs. Classical Guitar: the only one he named, also called La Fea, “the ugly one,” the name set against a lion’s volume, and guitarra feminine, so it could not be León. The German Wikipedia: listeners called the sound wild; who named it is not certain; Francisco Mingot’s letters to Tárrega show Torres using the word. Pierre says the word first appears in Tárrega’s letters to clients and to other players. Saucier puts a lioness-headed guitar in the main square of “La Canada de San Urbana,” his spelling for La Cañada de San Urbano, where Torres died. Classical Guitar dates the unveiling to November 1992 in Almería: a bronze bust, and a white marble guitar with a lioness’s head. Two place-names. Don’t average them.

Which box is La Leona is not closed. Romanillos, the English Wikipedia inventory, Classical Guitar, Erhard Hannen, and Wulfin Lieske mean this 1856. Joaquín Pierre, in Diario de Almería (30 September 2012), does not. The headline says as many as five candidates. The piece walks four. Alice Artz, in the 1970s, said she owned it; Pierre says her guitar is labeled 1858. Romanillos’s 1987 book, Pierre writes, calls that one a copy from the Soto shop in Seville. Pierre thinks he set it aside to favor the Hannen guitar — the candidate drawn from Tárrega and from Pujol, and the one Pierre calls the most doubtful. The objection is the restoration. Heavy work, which he says Romanillos admits, and a label that no longer convinces him. Third: the 1858 Sevilla exhibition guitar, a nacre plaque, now with the heirs of Esteban Petit Fortuny. Pierre has Domingo Prat saying that if a Leona existed, it should be this one. Classical Guitar catalogues that guitar as FE 08, a bronze medal at Sevilla in 1858, and has Prat calling it La guitarra cumbre, not La Leona. Keep the split. Fourth, for Pierre: the 1888 Almería guitar Tárrega ordered, the one he thinks became the measure and left the earlier guitars as relics. Classical Guitar’s SE 114 is that guitar. Tárrega’s last Torres, his widow’s favorite, sold in 1920 for 5,000 pesetas, later Sheldon Urlik’s. Not this label.

Two more names land on the wrong object. David George, in The Flamenco Guitar, mixed the plain 1856 with the showier FE 08 (German Wikipedia). Miguel Llobet called SE 116, an 1888, “La Leona de Farre,” after León Farré. Prat and Pujol called that same guitar “La Itálica.” It is in the Raccosta collection in Verona, and it has not been restored (English Wikipedia). Not FE 04.

The 1862 papier-mâché guitar is the other experiment. Spruce top, papier-mâché back and sides, to show that the top made the sound. Museu de la Música, Barcelona. Classical Guitar catalogues it FE 14. The English Wikipedia: the Yagüe brothers in Barcelona had it playable again before 2000. Not La Leona.

Cypress on the back does not make this a flamenco guitar. Saucier: a common Torres wood, and the flamenco association is later. He does not think the split existed yet. Strings, for Torres’s guitars as a class: European spruce, gut trebles, silk basses wound with silver (English Wikipedia). Nylon on classical guitars is a 1950s change. Not a string for this 1856.

He did not hand the shape to a factory. The Seville shop closed about 1870. “Somewhere around 12 guitars a year” is the English Wikipedia’s figure for the late Almería work, after Josefa Martín Rosada died in 1883. Every guitar he was making then. Not a count of Leonas, and not 1856.

Players

Do not hang FE 17, SE 114, SE 49, FE 08, or SE 116 on this plate. Do not treat a replica as the guitar Arcas borrowed.

Julián Arcas — loaned, not owned. The German Wikipedia: the 1856 was never sold to him. He played it in concert in Spain, including Madrid and Castellón de la Plana, and in England, and it stayed Torres’s. Guitar Salon’s note on the García copy dates an Arcas concert to 1862 and puts a nine-year-old Francisco Tárrega in the room. The German Wikipedia says the Castellón concert, Tárrega there with his father at nine, and that he was Arcas’s pupil. It does not print the year. Keep the age. Don’t invent a bill for the night.

Francisco Tárrega — more than one Torres, and the 1869 guitar is not this one. The English Wikipedia: shortly after Torres’s 1868 marriage, Tárrega, seventeen, came from Barcelona to buy a guitar from the maker of Arcas’s instrument. Torres offered a modest one he had in stock. Hearing him play, he offered a better guitar he had made for himself a few years before. Classical Guitar: that guitar is FE 17, 1864, flamed maple back and sides, sold to Tárrega in Seville in 1869. Pujol thought it the best he had heard. Tárrega smoked while he played; the top carries the burns. He used it hard for several years and bought another Torres to spare it. Christie’s provenance runs Torres, Tárrega, the Tárrega family, Maria Luisa Anido, then the collection of Prat Pallares. The English Wikipedia instead has Vicente Tárrega, Francisco’s brother, selling FE 17 to Domingo Prat in 1917. Anido and Prat Pallares, or Vicente and Domingo Prat. Don’t merge them. Classical Guitar: the guitar sold at auction in 2007 for $157,000. Not La Leona. Not a comp.

Lieske does not make the shop guitar this one either, and he does not agree with 1864 and 1869. On the tonebase lesson he says Tárrega played La Leona when he first came to Seville in 1867, that Torres then stopped him and brought out another guitar, and that the other one is the guitar he bought. In the 2021 tonebase interview he dates that purchase “1862 or 60.” Keep 1867, 1869, and “1862 or 60.” The tonebase description under the interview says La Leona was the first guitar Tárrega bought from Torres. His spoken account in the same video says the guitar sold that day was the other one.

A later purchase is a different sentence, and only one of the sources says it. The German Wikipedia: his daughter Anita inherited twelve guitars in 1892, La Leona among them; Tárrega bought it that year for his daughter and pupil Elvira; it stayed his until his death in 1909; a friend had it next and sold it in the 1920s to Don Hilario Solsona. The English Wikipedia’s inventory does not list Tárrega under FE 04. Classical Guitar does not either: the guitar he would not part with in his lifetime, now in a private collection in Germany. Guitar Salon’s page for the García copy says the same thing in shop language — loaned to Arcas, never sold, still his at his death in 1892. Don’t promote the 1892 sale over that, and don’t erase it.

Wulfin Lieske — the player, not the owner in his own telling. The German Wikipedia: played by Lieske since the 1990s. Siccas, July 2017, Manuel Lucena interviewing him: the question was ten or fifteen years; Lieske said he thought twenty or twenty-five. Don’t pick a start year inside that range. How it reached him, in that 2021 interview: Dr. Hannen was his private student, a quiet man, and one day asked if he might show him an old Torres. Lieske says he could hardly hide his disappointment. The same interview still calls Hannen the owner. The English Wikipedia inventory: owned by Erhard Hannen, played by Lieske. The German Wikipedia’s chain into that collection: a 1979 Guitar International article by Romanillos, the Solsona heirs ready to sell; in 1980 Hannen, a Cologne doctor and collector, bought it from Señora Luisa Solsona in Barcelona. It was in bad shape and not playable. Benno K. Streu, in Freiburg, restored it and found the original puente secreto again. Streu’s workshop book is 2017. The German Wikipedia also says Santos Hernández signed the inside in the early 1940s, beside the soundhole, a spot you reach only by opening the box. Lieske, in a comment under the 2021 video, says Hernández restored it and signed it. Signed, or restored and signed. Don’t collapse the verb.

The recordings the German Wikipedia ties to this guitar: 1998, What about this, Mr. Tárrega?, which it calls the first recording of it; 2007, El Canto de La Leona; 2025, Meditatio, his own pieces. The German Wikipedia says he set the pitch at a′ = 428 Hz. Under the tonebase lesson he calls 428 his own preference, and says pitch in Torres’s time was lower and not yet a standard. A decision, or a preference. Keep both.

Also known to play stays short, because the names that float nearby are not this guitar. The German Wikipedia says Tárrega, Llobet, Pujol, and Regino Sáinz de la Maza valued La Leona, and that one of them may have had a hand in the name. Valued is not a concert on FE 04. Pujol’s “best I have heard” is FE 17. Llobet’s “La Leona de Farre” is SE 116. SE 49 (1883) is another Tárrega guitar on the English Wikipedia’s list. Sáinz de la Maza’s Torres there is SE 124 (1888), a near-twin of SE 114 with bird’s-eye maple, restored and owned by R. E. Bruné. Not this plate.

Rarity

There is one guitar in the Romanillos catalogue under this name. You cannot order it. Pierre’s objection is that the restoration has already made that one identification a hypothesis. Either reading leaves you without a second original to shop.

Torres published no tally of 1856 guitars. None invented. The late “around 12 a year” is Almería, after 1883, and it counts every model he was making then. FE numbers date a guitar only in the sense that Romanillos ordered the ones he had found. They are not a year book. That is why a first-year census is the wrong question.

The German Wikipedia: copies were already being made after 1892, which is why Romanillos, for the book first published in 1987, had to sort every guitar carrying the name. It was still shown as La Leona in Barcelona in the 1950s, and the city’s players still knew which box it was into the 1960s. Then that knowledge thinned. Named copies, not this guitar: Marcelino López Nieto in Madrid, around or just before 1980; Gerhard Oldiges in Niederweimar from the early 1990s; Fritz Ober in Munich, before his death in 2020; Carl Hermann Schäfer in Niederbrechen, June 2017. A Darío García and a Jellinghaus are in a shop now. They are priced below, and they are not the Sevilla guitar.

This one was opened. Hernández’s signature says that much. It does not make the Hannen guitar a copy, and it does not answer Pierre. The English Wikipedia’s unrestored Torres guitars, FE 13 (1860) and SE 116, are other instruments.

Value

Informal estimate, 23 October 2026. Not an appraisal.

The original is not on the market. No hammer for FE 04 turned up this pass, and Hannen’s 1980 price is not in the sources used here. Don’t invent one. A replica ask is not a Torres. FE 17 at $157,000 in 2007, and SE 114 at 5,000 pesetas in 1920, are other guitars. Not comps.

New street. Nothing from Torres. He has been dead since 1892. Named replica asks, fetched with the pages this pass, not hammers and not this guitar: Guitar Salon, 2026 Wolfgang Jellinghaus “La Leona FE 04 645,” spruce and cypress, 645 mm, a saddle and no tornavoz, $3,500. Guitar Salon, 2025 Darío García “La Leona,” seven fans with a tornavoz, 650 mm, nut 51 mm, $6,500. The García card also prints 2.7 lbs / 1,225 grams. That pair is the copy. Do not average it with 1,200 g.

Used modern. No Reverb Price Guide band for a replica, and no sold replica isolated here. Flag: thin sold-comp access. A used Jellinghaus is still not a used Torres.

Vintage / collectible. One guitar, in a private collection in Germany, played by Lieske and owned, on his account and on the English Wikipedia, by Erhard Hannen. No 2026 ask. No 2026 sold. The $157,000 is FE 17. The 5,000 pesetas is the widow’s sale of SE 114. Leave them there.

See also

• ramirez-1a — Madrid’s later concert guitar; José Ramírez III started from a symmetrical Torres fan and then left it
• selmer-maccaferri — a 1930s guitar with its own internal system; not a Sevilla fan, and not this tornavoz
• godin-multiac — nylon on a thin chambered body with a 13-pin jack; not an 1856 concert guitar

Sources

• Wikipedia, Antonio de Torres Jurado — 13 June 1817–19 November 1892; carpenter at 12; Pernas theory c. 1842; guitars in the 1840s; Arcas and the 1850s; Cerrajería No. 7 with Soto; fan bracing not his invention; symmetrical kite; 1862 papier-mâché, Yagüe restoration before 2000; Sirvent; 1868 marriage; Tárrega at seventeen, modest guitar then a better one Torres had made for himself; shop closed c. 1870; second epoch about five years later; c. 12 a year after 1883; epochs 1852–1870 and 1871–1893; he numbered only the second epoch; gut and silk-silver; nylon from the 1950s; FE 03 of 1856 with Pepe Romero; FE 04 owned by Erhard Hannen, played by Wulfin Lieske; FE 17 sold to Tárrega in 1869; SE 114, 1888, Tárrega, now Sheldon Urlik; SE 116 “La Leona de Farre”; SE 124, Sáinz de la Maza, Bruné
• Wikipedia (German), La Leona — FE 04 as the fourth he built; label, Cerragería 32, 1856; never sold to Arcas; Madrid, Castellón, England; Tárrega at nine; Mingot’s letters; Anita’s twelve guitars; Tárrega buys it in 1892 for Elvira, until 1909; 1920s to Hilario Solsona; Romanillos in Guitar International, 1979; Hannen buys from Luisa Solsona, 1980; Streu; Hernández signed inside in the early 1940s; Lieske since the 1990s; 428 Hz; 1998, 2007, and 2025 recordings; 2008 X-ray, Fürth, and Greifenberger; seven fans “like La Leona” (Jahnel); dimensions including 649 mm, 1240 cm², 1,200 g with machines; Pernas bridge already in the 1840s; copies after 1892; David George confuses it with FE 08
• Classical Guitar, Kathleen A. Bergeron, Spring 2017 — FE 1852 to the early 1870s, SE from 1875; La Leona the only one he named, also La Fea; earliest known instrument with most of his innovations; pattern is a speculation; November 1992 monument in Almería; private collection in Germany; FE 08, Prat’s guitarra cumbre, 1858 bronze; FE 14 papier-mâché; FE 17 sold 1869, Pujol, $157,000 in 2007; SE 114, widow, 5,000 pesetas in 1920, Urlik
• John F. Saucier, La Leona — Sirvent via Pujol, the bled-spruce letter, “he called it La Leona”; Romanillos on rosewood fingerboard and bridge, two unmatched spruce pieces, floating harmonic bar, continuous linings, earliest surviving Torres tornavoz, convergence between frets 8 and 9 against 14 or 15 on SE 114 and FE 17; dimensions 263 / 229 / 343 / 464 mm, scale 649 mm, depths 91 / 94 / 97 mm, soundhole 86 mm, 1,200 g; unfinished while Torres owned it; props not a settled Torres fitting; cypress not yet a flamenco category
• Diario de Almería, Joaquín Pierre, 30 September 2012 — up to five candidates; Artz in the 1970s, an 1858 label, Romanillos 1987 calls it a Soto copy; the Hannen guitar as Romanillos’s candidate, restoration and the label; 1858 exhibition guitar, Petit Fortuny heirs, Prat; the 1888 Tárrega guitar as Pierre’s canon; the word, on his account, first in Tárrega’s letters
• Christie’s, ex-Francisco Tárrega, Seville, 1864 — FE 17 provenance: Torres, Tárrega, the family, Maria Luisa Anido, Prat Pallares. Not La Leona. The English Wikipedia’s Vicente-to-Domingo-Prat sale in 1917 is the other chain
• tonebase / Wulfin Lieske, “Playing Tárrega on Tárrega’s Original 1856 Guitar” — spoken: string length 650; Tárrega played this guitar on a first Seville visit in 1867 and was then sold another. His comment there: 428 Hz is his preference, not a period standard
• tonebase, “La Leona: Interview with Wulfin Lieske” (2021) — Hannen, his student, is the owner and showed him the guitar; the guitar Tárrega bought that day was another, “1862 or 60.” The description under the video says La Leona was the first he purchased. The interview does not
• Siccas Guitars, interview, July 2017 — Lucena’s ten or fifteen years; Lieske’s twenty or twenty-five
• Wulfin Lieske, comment on the 2021 interview — Hernández restored and signed the inside
• Guitar Salon International, 2025 Darío García “La Leona” — shop copy: loaned to Arcas, still his at his death in 1892; 1862 concert, Tárrega aged nine; “first” tornavoz, which is stronger than Romanillos’s earliest-surviving; replica ask $6,500; 650 mm; nut 51 mm; 2.7 lbs / 1,225 grams. Not the 1856
• Guitar Salon International, 2026 Jellinghaus “La Leona FE 04 645” — replica ask $3,500; 645 mm; saddle and no tornavoz, stated as departures. Not the 1856
• José L. Romanillos, Antonio de Torres, Guitar Maker: His Life and Work (Bold Strummer, 1987; 2nd ed. 1997) — the catalogue and the La Leona chapter behind Saucier, Classical Guitar, and both Wikipedias. Dimensions in this plate are cited from Saucier’s report of that catalogue, not re-measured