La Recepció de la música de Robert Gerhard a Catalunya durant el Franquisme (1948-1970): trobades i desavinences

Abstract

A conspicuous absence in Federico Sopeñas Historia de la música española contemporánea (1958), a composer without a homeland two years later in the words of Manuel Valls, and a racial and universalist in the opinion of Xavier Montsalvatge on the occasion of his death... indeed, what was the fate of Robert Gerhard and his music during the more than thirty-five years of the Franco regime? How did his progressive recovery in the Catalan musical scene come about? Gerhards distant shadow became a guide for Barcelonas Club 49 and its activities conceived to spread avant-garde music, despite the impossibility of anyone here receiving any direct effective tutoring from him (whith the sole exception of the then respected but isolated figure of Joaquim Homs) and only a handful of works from the oeuvre of Gerhard, the composer from Valls, reached the concert halls or, what was much more often the case, some very small circles of connoisseurs between 1950 and 1970, without there being any continued reception of his aesthetic ideas. This paper discusses the principal milestones in this reception process, in which Gerhards initially ambiguous and uncomfortable position in the Catalan cultural panorama of his times gave way, not without hesitations, to the progressive recognition of his fundamental role as part of the modernist tradition of Catalonia and as a leading figure of the Catalan musical avant-garde at the end of the period under consideration.