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Two years after Gerhard’s death, Francis Routh, in his book Contemporary British Music, included a lengthy discussion on Roberto Gerhard, albeit in the section titled ‘British by Choice: The Influence of Other Traditions’. While Routh praises the music of Gerhard, the Catalan-born composer remains in the category of ‘other’.
A Repertoire: Modern. Roberto Gerhard. Gerhard (1896 – 1970) was a Catalan composer who fled to Britain in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War and settled in Cambridge. Erudite, articulate, with wide-ranging cultural interests, he at one point studied under Schoenberg and had, by the 1950s, developed his own complex version of serialism ...
An introduction to Gerhard’s music by Calum MacDonald. Roberto Gerhard ended his career in the very forefront of musical modernism, producing in his last 15 years a series of scores notable for their scintillating textural invention and their almost Varesian cragginess of expression.
In a January 1963 New York Times story, Roberto Gerhard is described as a ‘Spanish-born composer who went to Vienna to study with Arnold Schoenberg and then, in 1929 [sic], took up residence in England’. 3 While this description says much about Gerhard’s cosmopolitan lifestyle, it offers little about the circumstances that shaped this identity. Much about Gerhard’s identity was ...
Gerhard took part in explicitly ideological cultural debates at key historical intersections of the 20th century. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, while in Berlin in Weimar Germany as a student of Arnold Schoenberg, and during the Spanish Second Republic (1931–9), his work as an intellectual and musician embraced the political role of culture and art in the fight against fascism and for the ...
On Gerhard's discourses on musical modernity after his studies with Schoenberg, see Diego Alonso, ‘Challenging Schoenberg's Modernism: Gerhard's Music and Aesthetics at the Turn of the 1930s’, in Perspectives on Gerhard: Selected Proceedings of the 2nd and 3rd International Roberto Gerhard Conferences, ed. Michael Russ and Monty Adkins (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield, 2015).
Catalan culture remained at the centre of his work, but despite his increasingly international reputation Spain remained closed to him as a composer until the end of his life. Links and sources. Roberto Gerhard on Wikipedia Roberto Gerhard Archive at Cambridge University Library Roberto Gerhard at Boosey & Hawkes Roberto Gerhard official website
