Roberto Gerhard


Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder was a Spanish and British composer, musical scholar, and writer, generally known outside his native region of Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.

Life

Gerhard was born in Valls, near Tarragona, Spain. His father was of German and Swiss ancestry; his mother was from Alsace-Lorraine. 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 and decided to shut himself away in a Catalan farmhouse 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 composer Arnold Schoenberg, enclosing his compositions, on 21 October 1923, begging to be accepted as his pupil. After the latter's acceptance, Gerhard immediately left for Vienna. He was Schoenberg's only Spanish pupil. Gerhard studied with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin between 1923 and 1928, and the teacher-pupil relationship became a lifelong friendship, as is shown in the complete correspondence published between the two composers.
In 1928, Gerhard returned to Barcelona. 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. He also collected, edited, and performed folksongs and Spanish music from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.
Gerhard supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He 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 scores 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 Homenaje a Pedrell, a symphony in memory of Pedrell, and the first version of the ballet Don Quixote. The period culminated with 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, but 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.
His archive is kept at Cambridge University Library. Other personal papers of Gerhard are preserved in the Biblioteca de Catalunya. The vast majority of the correspondence between Gerhard and Arnold Schoenberg can be found at the Arnold Schönberg Center.

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 Concerto for Orchestra, concertos for violin, piano and harpsichord, the cantata The Plague, 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.

Symphonies

  • Symphony Homenaje a Pedrell
  • Symphony No. 1
  • Symphony No. 2 ; recomposition as Metamorphosis, unfinished
  • Symphony No. 3 Collages
  • Symphony No. 4 New York
  • Symphony No. 5

  • Stage works

  • Ariel, ballet
  • Soirées de Barcelone, ballet in three tableaux
  • Don Quixote, ballet
  • Alegrias, Divertissement flamenco
  • Pandora, ballet
  • The Duenna, English opera after Sheridan. 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. 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".
  • El barberillo de Lavapies, arrangement and orchestration of the zarzuela by Francisco Barbieri
  • Lamparilla, German-language Singspiel loosely based on El barberillo de Lavapies with additional music and original overture by Gerhard

    Concertos

  • Concertino for string orchestra
  • Violin Concerto
  • Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra
  • Concerto for Harpsichord, String Orchestra and Percussion
  • Concerto for Orchestra

    Orchestral works

  • Albada, Interludi i Dansa
  • Dances from Don Quixote
  • Pedrelliana
  • Epithalamion
  • Various suites from Soirées de Barcelone, Alegrias, ''Pandora''

    Chamber and instrumental music

  • Sonatine a Carlos, piano
  • Trio in B major for violin, cello and piano
  • Trio No. 2 for violin, cello and piano
  • Dos Apunts, piano
  • 3 string quartets composed up to 1928
  • Sonata, clarinet and piano
  • Wind Quintet
  • Andantino, clarinet, violin and piano
  • String Quartet No. 1
  • Sonata, viola and piano
  • Capriccio, solo flute
  • 3 Impromptus, piano
  • Secret People for clarinet, violin and piano
  • Nonet
  • Fantasia, guitar
  • String Quartet No. 2
  • Concert for 8
  • Chaconne, violin solo
  • Hymnody for large wind ensemble, two pianos and percussion
  • For whom the bell tolls, for solo guitar
  • Gemini, Duo for violin and piano
  • Libra, sextet
  • Leo, Chamber Symphony

    Vocal works

  • L'infantament meravellós de Shahrazada Song-cycle for voice and piano, Op. 1
  • Verger de les galanies for voice and piano
  • 7 Haiku for voice and ensemble
  • 14 Cançons populars catalanes for voice and piano
  • L'alta naixenca del Rei en Jaume, cantata for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra
  • Cancionero de Pedrell for voice and piano or chamber orchestra
  • 3 Canciones Toreras for voice and orchestra
  • 6 Chansons populaires françaises for voice and piano
  • The Akond of Swat for voice and percussion
  • Cantares for voice and guitar
  • The Plague, cantata for narrator, chorus and orchestra, after Camus

    Electronic music

  • Audiomobiles I-IV
  • Lament for the death of Bullfighter for speaker and tape
  • Caligula
  • 10 Pieces for tape
  • Sculptures I-V
  • DNA in Reflection
  • Anger of Achilles with Delia Derbyshire
  • also tape component in Symphony No.3 and in many film, radio and theatre scores

    Fantasias on themes from Zarzuelas

  • Cadiz, after Chuca & Valverde
  • Gigantes y Cabezudos, after Caballero
  • La Viejecita, after Caballero

    Film music

  • Secret People
  • ''This Sporting Life''

    Articles and broadcasts by Gerhard

  • 'Roberto Gerhard's Symphony': Radio Times, Oct 23, 1959, p. 9
  • 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.