Robert Gerhard
Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder (; 25 September 1896 – 5 January 1970) was a Spanish Catalan composer and musical scholar and writer, generally known outside Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard. Life. Gerhard was born in Valls, near Tarragona, Spain, the son of a German-Swiss father and an Alsatian mother. He was predisposed to an international, multilingual outlook, but by birth and culture he was a Catalan. He studied piano with Enrique Granados and composition with scholar-composer Felip Pedrell, teacher of Isaac Albéniz, Granados and Manuel de Falla. When Pedrell died in 1922, Gerhard tried unsuccessfully to become a pupil  of Falla and considered studying with Charles Koechlin in Paris but then approached Arnold Schoenberg, who on the strength of a few early compositions accepted him as his only Spanish pupil. Gerhard spent several years with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin. Returning to Barcelona in 1928, 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 there. He also collected, edited and performed  folksongs and old Spanish music from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Identified with the Republican cause throughout 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), Gerhard 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 copious work 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 "Symphony" in memory of Pedrell and the first version of the ballet "Don Quixote". They culminated in a masterpiece as "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 though not in Spain. 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). His archive is kept at Cambridge University Library. Other personal papers of Robert Gerhard are preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya. Music. Stylistic evolution. 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'. 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. Selected list of works. 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.