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Spanish and British composer (1896–1970) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder (Catalan pronunciation: [ruˈβɛɾd ʒəˈɾaɾt]; 25 September 1896 – 5 January 1970) was a Spanish and British composer, musical scholar, and writer, generally known outside his native region of Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.[1]
Gerhard was born in Valls, near Tarragona, Spain. His father was of German and Swiss ancestry; his mother was from Alsace-Lorraine. He studied piano with Enrique Granados and composition with scholar-composer Felip Pedrell, teacher of Isaac Albéniz, Granados and Manuel de Falla. Gerhard visited Falla in Granada, but dismissed him as a possible teacher[2] and decided to shut himself away in a Catalan farmhouse[3] to reflect on his professional future and concentrate on his work. Seeking systematicity, he turned his gaze to German avant-garde music and decided to send a long letter to the composer Arnold Schoenberg, enclosing his compositions, on 21 October 1923, begging to be accepted as his pupil.[4] After the latter's acceptance, Gerhard immediately left for Vienna. He was Schoenberg's only Spanish pupil. Gerhard studied with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin between 1923 and 1928, and the teacher-pupil relationship became a lifelong friendship, as is shown in the complete correspondence published between the two composers.[5]
In 1928, Gerhard returned to Barcelona. He devoted his energies to new music through concerts and journalism, in conjunction with the flourishing literary and artistic avant-garde of Catalonia. He befriended Joan Miró and Pablo Casals, brought Schoenberg and Anton Webern to Barcelona, and was the principal organizer of the 1936 ISCM Festival. He also collected, edited, and performed folksongs and Spanish music from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.[1]
Gerhard supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (as musical adviser to the Minister of Fine Arts in the Catalan Government and a member of the Republican government's Social Music Council). He was forced to flee to France in 1939 and later that year settled in Cambridge, England. Until the death of Francisco Franco, his music was virtually proscribed in Spain, to which he never returned except for holidays. Apart from scores for the BBC and in the theatre, Gerhard's compositions of the 1940s were explicitly related to aspects of Spanish and Catalan culture, beginning in 1940 with a Homenaje a Pedrell, a symphony in memory of Pedrell, and the first version of the ballet Don Quixote. The period culminated with The Duenna, a Spanish opera on an English play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, which is set in Spain. The Covent Garden production of Don Quixote and the BBC broadcasts of The Duenna popularized Gerhard's reputation in the UK, but not in Spain.[6]
During the 1950s, the legacy of Schoenbergian serialism, a background presence in these overtly national works, engendered an increasingly radical approach to composition which, by the 1960s, placed Gerhard firmly in the ranks of the avant-garde. From the early 1950s Gerhard suffered from a heart condition which eventually ended his life. He died in Cambridge in 1970 and is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, with his wife Leopoldina 'Poldi' Feichtegger Gerhard (1903–1994).[1]
His archive is kept at Cambridge University Library. Other personal papers of Gerhard are preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya. The vast majority of the correspondence between Gerhard and Arnold Schoenberg can be found at the Arnold Schoenberg Center.
For twenty years – first in Barcelona and then in exile in England – Gerhard cultivated, and enormously enriched, a modern tonal idiom with a pronounced Spanish-folkloric orientation that descended on the one hand from Pedrell and Falla, and on the other from such contemporary masters as Bartók and Stravinsky. This was the idiom whose major achievements included the ballets Soirées de Barcelone and Don Quixote, the Violin Concerto and the opera The Duenna.
Gerhard often said that he stood by the sound of his music: 'in music the sense is in the sound'.[7] Yet dazzling as their scoring is, his last works are in no sense a mere succession of sonic events. Their forms are meticulously organized and several make use of his special development of serialism where a twelve-tone pitch series, governing intervallic relations, interacts with a twelvefold time series governing the music's duration and proportions.[8]
Gerhard's most significant works, apart from those already mentioned, include four symphonies (the Third, Collages, for orchestra and tape), the Concerto for Orchestra, concertos for violin, piano and harpsichord, the cantata The Plague (after Albert Camus), the ballets Pandora and Ariel, and pieces for a wide variety of chamber ensembles, including Sardanas for the indigenous Catalan street band, the cobla. He was perhaps the first important composer of electronic music in Britain; his incidental music for the 1955 Stratford-on-Avon King Lear – one of many such commissions for the Royal Shakespeare Company – was the first electronic score for the British stage.[9]
(for light orchestra; composed c. 1943 under the pseudonym "Juan Serralonga")
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