Roberto Gerhard
(1896 - 1970)
Piano Music
As one might
expect from a pupil of Granados and Pedrell, Gerhard's linguistic
starting-point was the somewhat limited conventions of the Spanish Nationalist
tradition. It was the Dos Apunts (1921-1922) for piano, the earliest of
the music here recorded, that signalled the first abrupt change in direction.
Written at the end of a four years silence following Gerhard's withdrawal from
Spanish musical life, these aphoristic "sketches" are symbolic
landmarks not only in his own development but, retrospectively, in that of
twentieth century Spanish music. Their epigrammatic concision and protoserial
tendencies were unprecedented in Spanish music and reveal a significant change
in musical vocabulary, suggesting the influence of Schoenberg as well as
Scriabin. Though an obvious Spanish accent is not discernible, their freely
chromatic melodic style does reflect the modal evocations of Catalan folk-song
rather than the distorted contours of Viennese expressionism. In the second Apunt,
Gerhard even quotes, in a characteristically dissonant harmonic context, EI
Coti/l6, a Catalan folk-song that came to symbolize for him the theme of
"exile", both spiritual and physical: it would reappear many times in
Gerhard's output culminating in a final, valedictory appearance in the Fourth
Symphony of 1967.
Soirees de
Barcelone (1936-38) was
commissioned by Colonel de Basil' s Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo in 1936 at
the outset of the Spanish civil war, but was shelved following the outbreak of
World War II in 1939 and the dissolution of i de Basil's company. Thankfully
Gerhard was to extract a suite of dances from the ballet during the more
propitious circumstances of the 1950s and it is this version that is performed
here. The project was instigated by Antal Dorati and Leonide Massine. The
scenario, by the Arts Minister in the Catalan government, Ventura Gassol, is an
exercise in Catalan ethnography involving primitive fertility dances and ritual
fire ceremonies associated with La nuit de Saint Jean (St John's Eve),
one of Catalonia's most important religious festivals and, as such, a profound
expression of catalanitat. At no time was the need for such a defiant
statement of Catalan identity greater than during the civil war; and it is not
surprising that some of Gassol's patriotic fervour should have rubbed off on
Gerhard, who identified closely (without ever being narrowly catalanistic) with
the aspiration of the Catalan people and their historical struggle for national
independence.
Gerhard's music
for the ballet is “deliberately Catalan” (and therefore Republican) in
sentiment and draws heavily on Catalan folk traditions. It is clear that had
the ballet been completed, it could have become as important a document of
Catalan culture as stravinsky's Petrushka and Rite of Spring are
of Russian culture. Like stravinsky (and unlike Bartok) Gerhard quotes directly
authentic native folk-songs and refers to specific ritual dances. All are
particularly apt in relation to Gassol’s scenario: for the dances around the
cross called for in Tableau 1 (performed, incidentally, by dancers who have
been served wine by priests) Gerhard appropriates the music associated with EI
ball de l'hereu Riera, an agile sword-dance in which the swords are placed,
in the shape of a cross, on a glass of wine; for the opening of the final
tableau (L'Aube), surely intended, amongst other things, to be a
symbolic dawn heralding a final Catalan/Republican victory, Gerhard
counter-points against each other two well known, and rhythmically almost
identical, Catalan songs: Muntanyes dei Canigo and Eis segadors. The
first refers to Mount Canigo, the symbolic
Catalan mountain which is celebrated in Verdaguer's epic poem about the
legendary origins of Catalonia, Canig6, and from which shepherds
on St. John's night form relays to carry sparks to light
other fires all over Catalonia. The second dates back to the war of the
Reapers and recalls the confrontation between the troops of Philip IV and the
Catalan segadors. It is that most stirring of Catalan songs, the
anti-Castilian Song of the Harvesters, a song which became the unofficial
national hymn of Catalonia and whose reference to peasants armed with sickles
made it a popular communist marching song during the Spanish civil war; for the
Fandanguillo des maries of Tableau III (final movement of the suite)
Gerhard quotes, in a modified form, a Catalan song which tells of a seventeenth
century bandit who roamed the hills around Barcelona and who was imprisoned on
St. John's night, a reference, presumably, to Joan de Serrallonga, a Catalan
folk- hero who, having been sentenced to death on the orders of the Castilian
viceroy, came to be seen as a defender of the rights of the Catalan people
against the oppression of Castile; and the ballet was to end with the national
dance of Catalonia, a triumphant Sardana (third movement of the suite),
with the lovers brought together by Eros during the illicit encounters of St
John's night being reconciled with the "grotesque old men" and
"scandalised notaries" who had discovered them the night before and
dragged them reluctantly back to the village. During the course of this Sardana,
Gerhard alludes to the popular Catalan ballad La filla deI marxant and
La dansa de Castelltercol, a dance performed to this day in the town of
Castelltercol to the accompaniment of the Catalan wind band, or cobla. In
the dance the young men of the town offer their fernale partners to dance with
the mayor, the parish priest and the chief of police; and it was this, an essentially
communal statement of Catalan national consciousness, which was to bring
Gerhard's Ballet CataIan to its conclusion.
Gerhard
transcribed the suite of Dances from Don Quixote for piano in 1947 from
the unperformed hour-long ballet score that he had composed in 1940-41 to his
own scenario. The ballet was first performed, in a new "definitive"
version, in 1950 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, by the Sadler's Wells Company with choreography by
Ninette de Valois, decor by the British surrealist Edward Burra and with Robert
Helpman and Margot Fonteyn in the principal roles.
Gerhard's ballet
is a Spanish complement to Strauss's tone-poem on the same subject but offers a
more profoundly psychological interpretation of Cervantes' Knight. Don Quixote's
dual personality is symbolized by a Catalan-sounding furioso theme but
from which Gerhard extracts a serial abstract to represent the delusions and
obsessions of the Don's inner world: a typical example of Gerhard's effortless
synthesis of Schoenbergian and Spanish elements. The fact that the Don's theme
reveals (as the composer acknowledged) a close kinship to processional music
performed by a Catalan folk-oboe (or gralla) in Gerhard's home town of Valls is significant, suggesting that the composer identified,
albeit subconsciously, with Cervantes' immortal knight. In his
notebooks, the composer reminds us that "Don Quixote's tragic fight is to
keep his belief in himself and his mission alive". It is a struggle
that the Gerhard of 1940-41, a refugee from Franco's Spain
now settled in Cambridge, would have acutely understood.
1. Introduction.
Excerpts form scene 1 of the ballet which is set in a bare room and shows
the sleepwalking knight, wrapped in a sheet and brandishing a sword, in the
middle of one of his hallucinatory fits. In the vision, Don Quixote
transforms Aldonza Lorenzo, a peasant-girl from the neighbouring village, into
the idealised Dulcinea, mistress of his thoughts. A transitional allegretto introduces
Sancho Panza, the Don’s squire in his journey of knight errantry, who helps his
master put on his armour. Together, the Don and Sancho sally forth to seek
adventures.
2. Dance of the
Muleteers. At a dubious wayside inn muleteers and country wenches are
dancing a Seguidilla manchega to the music of an appropriately
licentious Tonone from the tonadilla, EI Pretendiente (1780) by
Pablo Esteve y Grimau. Their boisterous merry-making is disturbed by the
arrival of Don Quixote (and his fortissimo theme) who, in his delirium,
mistakes the inn for an enchanted castle and the dancers for lords and ladies
in distress. He begs the innkeeper to dub him a knight and, to humour him, the
innkeeper consents.
3. The golden
age. A Iyrical pas de deux danced by an idealised shepherd and
shepherdess illustrates the tale of a utopian "Golden Age" told by
the Don to some goatherds who had kindly entertained him for supper.
4. The Cave of Montesinos. Don Quixote is lowered into the Cave of Montesinos where, having fallen asleep, he mistakenly
believes himself to be transported into an enchanted subterranean palace. There
he witnesses the daily procession of Lady Belerma and her attendants who mourn
the famous Knight Durandarte. Don Quixote is led to the sarcophagus and
introduced to the recumbent Durandarte as a renowned spellbreaker, only to be
contemptuously dismissed. Another shock awaits the Don as Dulcinea, in the form
of the peasant-girl Aldonza, appears to him and provocatively offers to
exchange her petticoat for money. The Knight is appalled, his faith in his
mission fatally shaken. The music Gerhard composed for this scene is
particularly apt: a canonic introducci6n is followed by an appropriately
aristocratic Chacona de Palacio (based on a seven-bar ground) above
which Gerhard quotes two vernacular folk-songs from Salina's sixteenth century
treatise, De Musica Libri Septem, appropriate music indeed with which to
personify the wanton Aldonza.
Subsequent scenes
(omitted from the suite) describe events leading to the Don's final
disenchantment.
5. Epilogue. Excerpts
from the finale. Don Quixote lies dying, his sanity restored. The
grief-stricken Sancho kneels before a visionary apparition of Dulcinea with a
gesture of impassioned appeal.
Three
Impromptus
The late 1940s
were, with the renewed interest in Schoenbergian serialism in particular, a
turning-point in the work of many "middle generation" composers
including Messiaen, Carter, Cage and, as the 12-note Three Impromptus (1950)
confirm, Gerhard himself. They are light-weight character studies of the Earl
of Harewood, his wife, and an "expected third human being" (hence the
central Catalan lullaby) and were presented to the couple as a wedding-present.
From the purely technical point of view their main interest lies in the fact
that Gerhard does not employ the series thematically, but exploits to good
effect his very personal, permutational 12-note technique; and it is as if to
demonstrate the flexibility of his technique that, in the first Impromptu an
Andalusian fandanguillo, the composer imitates guitar textures, subtly
develops the polymodal implications of the row's hexachordal structure and even
integrates Spanish popular songs into the 12-note texture (a Polo from
Manuel Garcia's tonadilla, EI Contrabandista, and an Andalusian
folk-song, Los Pelegrinitos arranged by Lorca in one of his song
collections: an early example in I Gerhard's late works of folk-song used not
only as a means of affirming his national roots, but of ensuring a safeguard
against w hat he regarded as "the dehumanising tendencies of a purely
intellectual approach to composition".
@ 1994 Julian
White
Roberto Gerhard
was born at Valls on 25th September 1896. From childhood he showed a great
interest in music and at the age of seventeen gave up his business studies in Lausanne that his parents had made him pursue to enter the Royal Academy in Munich.
The war of 1914 compelled him to return to his own country , where he completed
his piano studies with Granados in 1915 and 1916 and his composition studies
from 1915 to 1920 with Felip Pedrell, an important musicologist responsible for
a revival of interest in folk-song and old Spanish polyphony, the teacher of
Albeniz and Falla.
The first
published works of Gerhard were the two Ciclos de canciones (1917-19)
and the Piano Trio (1918-1920), compositions that showed his deep
musicality .After the death of Pedrell in 1922 he embarked on a new stage with
the Dos apunts for piano and the seven Haiku for voice and
instrumental accompaniment, refreshing works of great beauty. This short
transitional period was followed by travel to various cities of Spain and Europe, ending with the sending of a long letter
to Schoenberg, accompanied by his most recent compositions, asking to be
accepted as a pupil. After a successful preliminary interview he attended the
latter's classes in Vienna and Berlin
during the years from 1923 to 1928. In 1929 he returned to Barcelona, where he
gave a concert of his latest works, among them the Wind Quintet (1928),
in which he used in a very personal way the serial technique with which he had
begun to experiment in 1923 and 1924, based on the constant rotation of the
series of twelve notes and the fundamental unity of melody and harmony.
In 1930 Gerhard
married Leopoldina (Poldi) Fleichtegger, from Vienna,
and settled in Barcelona. The period was one of economic crisis and
political change in the city, leading to the proclamation of the Republic in
1931 and the Civil War from 1936 to 1939, and the subsequent establishment of a
dictatorship that lasted until 1975.
In the years from
1930 to 1938 Gerhard composed the cantata L' alta naixent;a deI Rei En Jaume
on a text by the poet J. Carner, the music for two ballets, Ariel and
Soirees de Barcelona and Albada interludi i dansa for orchestra
as well as various songs. He also undertook various musicological projects for
the Biblioteca de Catalunya, was a member of the Consell de Musica,
collaborated in various editions and translated German writings of musical
interest, arranging for Schoenberg to spend eight months in Barcelona, during
which he wrote the greater part of the second act of his opera Moses und
Aron and his last piece for piano.
At the beginning
of 1939, shortly before the end of the Spanish Civil War, the Gerhards decided
to leave the country. They first went to Paris and Meudon, and then, in June,
to Cambridge, where they spent the rest of their lives, with the exception of
two journeys abroad to the United States of America to give courses in
composition and some holidays in Catalunya. During the first ten years of his
stay in England (six of them during the World War) Gerhard wrote the greater
part of his music of national inspiration to obtain I commissions from the BBC,
which brought him immediately great prestige, similar to that of Falla. His principal
works during this period were Sinfonia homenaje a Pedrell (1941), music
for the ballets Alegrias (1942), Pandora, Don Quixote (1947) and
the Violin Concerto (1942-45), with the opera The Duenna (1942-47),
a work that only had a concert performance during his lifetime, to have a
highly successful full staging in 1992,22 years after the composer's death.
During the three
final years of this first period of residence in Cambridge (1949-53) Gerhard
limited his compositional activity to the creation of the final version of the
ballet Don Quixote, a work that was very well received, and to the
writing of a Viola Sonata and incidental music for two plays by
Shakespeare. The principal reason for this break in creative activity was the
necessity of re- examining his position with regard to Schoenbergian technique
in the light of new heterodox theories of serialism that had been produced in
Europe and America, at the same time that his musical thought was enriched by
intense exploration in the field of philosophy, science and literature,
subjects that always greatly interested him.
The first result
of his reflexions in the field of music were heard in the Capriccio for
flute (1949), the three Impromptus for piano of 1950 and the two first
movements of the String Quartet (1951), culminating in the Symphony
No.1 first performed at the I.S.C.M. meeting in Baden in 1955, the fifth
work that he had had performed at festivals of the international contemporary
music organization.
From the end of
that year, when he already enjoyed great prestige in England, until1959, he explored in his works the possibilities of Schoenberg's
serial technique in metre and rhythm in the structure of his compositions.
Gerhard made use of these developed techniques in the two last movements of his
Quintet No.1, in the Nonet of 1957 and in his Symphony No.2 (1957-59).
In the 1950s
Gerhard also interested himself in musique concrete and electronic music, which
he first used in various commissions for the theatre and cinema and finally, in
1960, in the Symphony No.3 (Collages) commissioned by the Koussevitsky
Foundation. In this work Gerhard added to the orchestra an electronic score
transmitted through an amplifier.
In the first years
of the 1960s Gerhard made two journeys to the United States, the first to the
University of Michigan, where he composed his String Quartet No.2, and
the second to Templewood, where he w rote his Concerto para 8.
In the three
following years at Cambridge he w rote Hymnody, for instrumental
ensemble, the cantata La Peste for a BBC commission, and his Concerto
tor orchestra for the Cheltenham Festival, with a total of six very
important works in six years, not including the numerous commissions for
theatre, cinema and television.
Finally, during
the last four years of his life, he was able to refuse commercial I commissions
and in spite of his weak physical condition he wrote six important and very
significant works, Epitalamio for orchestra and Gemini for violin
and piano in 1966, Symphony No.4 (New York) , Metamorfosis for
orchestra (a revision of Symphony No.2) (1967-68), Libra (1968)
and Leo (1969) for instrumental ensemble, and when he died on 5th
January 1970 he had started a Symphony No.5 and planned a String
Quartet No.3.
As can be seen
from this brief summary of the life and work of Gerhard, in spite of difficult
circumstances he never failed to respond with originality and creativity to new
musical situations, climates and currents, always moving forward. Altogether he
wrote 120 works, including music commissioned for the stage, radio and
television. Among these the most remarkable are those that he w rote in the
last stage of his life, conceived in a single polymorphic movement that
demonstrated the best qualities of his music with extraordinary power.
Joaquim Homs
(English version by Keith Anderson)