How I met with François de Fossa
By Jan de Kloe
At a guitar festival in Pasadena, many years ago, I was approached by Matanya Ophee, the guitar historian, music publisher and the man who has rediscovered François de Fossa. We knew each other from articles we had published in guitar magazines but we had never met. He said to me “you live in Brussels, right?” I confirmed and then he told me he was looking for an old music publication of guitar duets by François de Fossa, the only known copy being held by the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels. I told him that in the years that I studied there I had seen this issue. He was surprised. At the time I had gone over all the guitar publications of the 19th century in the library. When I came across this publication I told my teacher, Nicolas Alfonso – who played in duo with his wife – about this and he was aware of its existence but was not interested. So I discarded it then. Matanya asked me to obtain a Xerox of the work which I ordered. The librarian lived nearby my home and said I could pick the copy up at her house the week after.
Thus I received nine duets based on the works of Haydn in the arrangement of François de Fossa. Making a modern edition of these duets offered a particular problem – the historic edition missed a page which had to be reconstructed by using the original Haydn version. Shortly after that I was on vacation on the East coast of America and dropped by at Matanya’s home in Ohio and offered to do the editing of this quite sizable and impressive collection. He agreed but on the condition that I would do the notesetting on a computer using specialized software which he gave me on a diskette together with a user guide. The package to prepare music for publication is called Score and at the time was being used by several music publishers. However, the way to enter music into the computer was rather cumbersome, primitive and time consuming. As by profession I was a software developer, I made a computer program to easily and rapidly enter music and within a few weeks I had edited the entire collection of duets. Another visit to Ohio and I passed him the files from which he could have the music printed. He was quite surprised about the short period that I had used for this job and I explained him the Score Input Program that I had developed. He suggested I should offer this to the Score community which I did and I sold multiple copies. Then he gave me a new project – the Chopin mazurkas which were guitar arrangements by a contemporary guitarist. Since then the projects kept coming, also by De Fossa. Dozens of editions were the result of our cooperation. Our common interest made us friends for life. Matanya also put me in contact with the French association that promotes the composer of Perpignan which he had unearthed. Several times we traveled together to this city in the south of France for the yearly commemoration of the composer.
In the meantime several guitar duos have recorded the Haydn duets and played them in concerts.
November 29, 2025