Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder (Catalan pronunciation:[ruˈβɛɾdʒəˈɾaɾt]; 25 September 1896 – 5 January 1970) was a
SpanishCatalan composer and musical scholar and writer, generally known outside
Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.[1]
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. 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 then famous Viennese composer Arnold Schönberg, enclosing his compositions, on 21 October 1923, begging to be accepted as his pupil.[4] After the latter's agreement, Gerhard immediately left for Vienna and settled there to receive his teachings, thus becoming the only Spanish pupil of the Viennese master and becoming part of the so-called Second Viennese School. Gerhard studied with Arnold Schönberg in Vienna and Berlin between 1923 and 1928, and the teacher-pupil relationship became a true friendship with the Viennese master until his death, as is shown in the complete correspondence published between the two composers.[5]
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.[1]
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.[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]
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]
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-AvonKing Lear – one of many such commissions for the
Royal Shakespeare Company – was the first electronic score for the British stage.[9]
Symphonies
Symphony Homenaje a Pedrell (1941)
Symphony No. 1 (1952–53)
Symphony No. 2 (1957–59); recomposition as Metamorphosis, unfinished (1967–68)
Symphony No. 3 Collages (for orchestra and tape) (1960)
Symphony No. 4 New York (1967)
Symphony No. 5 (fragment only) (1969)
(for Chamber Symphony Leo see "Chamber music")
Stage works
Ariel, ballet (1934)
Soirées de Barcelone, ballet in three tableaux (1937–39; edited and orchestration completed by Malcolm MacDonald, 1996)
Don Quixote, ballet (original version 1940–41, rev. 1947–49)
Alegrias, Divertissement flamenco (1942)
Pandora, ballet (1943–44, orch. 1944–45)
The Duenna, English opera after Sheridan (1947–49). Radio performance was in 1949, at BBC; its first scenic performance was in 1992 at
Teatro de la Zarzuela, Madrid, and
Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona.[citation needed] The
Bielefeld Opera and conductor
Geoffrey Moull performed The Duenna in a new production in 1994. The Wiener Zeitung at the time remarked that the work is "a rediscovered stroke of genius".[10]
El barberillo de Lavapies, arrangement and orchestration of the zarzuela (1874) by Francisco Barbieri (1954)
Lamparilla, German-language Singspiel loosely based on El barberillo de Lavapies with additional music and original overture by Gerhard (1955–56)
Concertos
Concertino for string orchestra (1929)
Violin Concerto (1942–43)
Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra (1951)
Concerto for Harpsichord, String Orchestra and Percussion (1955–56)
Concerto for Orchestra (1965)
Orchestral works
Albada, Interludi i Dansa (1936)
Epithalamion (1966)
Various suites from Soirées de Barcelone, Don Quixote, Alegrias, Pandora
Chamber and instrumental music
Sonatine a Carlos, piano (1914)
Trio in B major for violin, cello and piano (1918)
Trio No. 2 for violin, cello and piano (1918)
Dos Apunts, piano (1921–22)
3 string quartets composed up to 1928 (all lost; No. 3 (1928) was reworked as the Concertino for strings)
Sonata, clarinet and piano (1928; also version for bass clarinet and piano)
'Roberto Gerhard's Symphony': Radio Times, Oct 23, 1959, p. 9 (An introduction to the Second Symphony, which was commissioned by the BBC and first performed and broadcast on Oct 28, 1959. Gerhard also contributed an item on the work to 'Music Magazine' on the BBC Home Service, Oct 25, 1959.)
Gerhard worked with
Lionel Salter on a radio series, The Heritage of Spain, broadcast on the BBC
Third Programme in 26 parts from January 1954.[11]
Gerhard, Roberto, and Meirion Bowen. 2000. Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings, edited by Meirion Bowen. Aldershot [Hants, UK] and Burlington [Vermont]: Ashgate.
ISBN0-7546-0009-2
Homs, Joaquim. 1991. Robert Gerhard i la seva obra. Barcelona: Biblioteca de Catalunya.
ISBN84-7845-109-9
Proceedings of the 1st International Roberto Gerhard Conference : May 27–28th 2010. England: Centre for Research in New Music, University of Huddersfield, 2010.
ISBN978-1-86218-088-8
London Sinfonietta. 1974. Programme book for The complete Instrumental and Chamber Music of Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard. London: London Sinfonietta.
Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina. Arnold Schönberg und Roberto Gerhard. Briefwechsel. Kritische Ausgabe. Peter Lang, Berna, 2019. ISBN 978-3-0343-3754-0),
doi:
10.3726/b15301I Open Access: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1110910
Paloma Ortiz-de-Urbina. Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard. Correspondence. Critical Edition, Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura, Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2020. ISBN 9788418199073.
Routh, Francis. Contemporary British Music (1972), pp. 175-187.
References
^
abcMalcolm MacDonald. 'Gerhard, Roberto' in Grove Music Online (2001)
^Sánchez de Andrés, Leticia (2013). "Pasión, desarraigo y literatura. El compositor Robert Gerhard". Musicalia Scherzo. Madrid: 55.
^Ortiz-de-Urbina, Paloma (2020). Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard. Correspondence. Critical Edition. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura. p. 20.
ISBN9788418199073.
^Ortiz-de-Urbina, Paloma (2020). Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard. Correspondence. Critical Edition. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura. p. 35.
ISBN9788418199073.
^Ortiz-de-Urbina, Paloma (2020). Arnold Schoenberg and Roberto Gerhard. Correspondence. Critical Edition. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura.
ISBN9788418199073.
^Composer's Note to the published score of Libra, Oxford University Press 1970; other programme notes have the same statement in varying words and word-orders
^Gerhard, Roberto (1960). Functions of the series in twelve-note composition. Originally a talk given at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Reprinted in Bowen, Meirion, ed. (2000). Gerhard on Music – Selected Writings. Taylor & Francis.
ISBN9781315200583.
OCLC1003950418.[page needed]
Diego Alonso. "Un hito de la modernidad musical española: el primer Apunt para piano de Roberto Gerhard", Acta musicologica, Vol. 89, Nº 2, 2017, págs. 171-194
Diego Alonso. "“A Heretic in the Schoenberg Circle: Roberto Gerhard’s First Engagement with Twelve-Tone Procedures in Andantino”, Twentieth-Century Music 16 / 3 (2019): 557-588.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572219000306
Diego Alonso. “Homage to Schoenberg and Bartók: Symmetry, Transpositional Combination and Octatonicism in the First Movement of Roberto Gerhard’s Quartetto No. 3.” Music Analysis 39 / 2 (2020), 190–213.
https://doi.org/10.1111/musa.12156