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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 ...
Sep 23, 2024 · Gerhard: Don Quixote, Alegrías & Pedrelliana (BBC Philharmonic, Juanjo Mena) A great, under-represented 20th-century ballet score, stunningly recorded. Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) was a Catalan-born, Spanish composer. His two early teachers were the pedagogue Felipe Pedrell (who also taught Granados and Manuel de Falla), and Arnold Schoenberg.
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 ...
In fact, Gerhard never truly renounced his Catalan heritage, which continued to nourish his flamboyant colour-sense and even provide specific melodic gestures right up to his very last scores. But the Concertos for violin, piano and harpsichord chart a progress away from the more anecdotal aspects of that heritage towards a more flexible and radicalized language.
Roberto Gerhard was born in the Catalan town of Valls, and educated in the nearby city of Barcelona. Having studied piano with Granados until the latter’s untimely death in 1916, he spent a further four years studying with the eminent composer and ethnomusicologist Felipe Pedrell.
The recommendations made by Dent and John B. Trend emphasising Gerhard’s merits as a Catalan musicologist and composer played a key role in his securing the scholarship. 12 The only condition of the scholarship was that Gerhard settle in Cambridge: ‘If we are successful in inviting you … you would be free to continue your research and your compositions (which we also consider as research).
