Museu de la Música de Barcelona

This guide to the Museu de la Música de Barcelona centers on an unlikely guitar built from papier mache, and the argument among luthiers it was built to settle. You'll hear about Antonio de Torres, the Seville luthier who redesigned the classical guitar around the idea that the spruce soundboard, not the back and sides, shapes the sound, and how he set out in 1862 to prove skeptics wrong with the cheapest material he could find. Listen for how later restorers brought the fragile instrument back to playable life.