Music and Exile in Francoist Spain

Eva Rodriguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134805860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

The Spanish Republican exile of 1939 impacted music as much as it did literature and academia, with well-known figures such as Adolfo Salazar and Roberto Gerhard forced to leave Spain. Exile is typically regarded as a discontinuity - an irreparable dissociation between the home country and the host country. Spanish exiled composers, however, were never totally cut off from the musical life of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), be it through private correspondence, public performances of their work, honorary appointments and invitations from Francoist institutions, or a physical return to Spanish soil.

Music and Exile in Francoist Spain analyses the connections of Spanish exiled composers with their homeland throughout 1939-1975. Taking the diversity and heterogeneity of the Spanish Republican exile as its starting point, the volume presents extended comparative case studies in order to broaden and advance current conceptions of, and debates surrounding, exile in musicology and Spanish studies. In doing so, it significantly furthers academic research on individual composers including Salvador Bacarisse, Julian Bautista, Roberto Gerhard, Rodolfo Halffter, Julian Orbon and Adolfo Salazar. As the first English-language monograph to explore the exiled composers from the perspectives of historiography, music criticism, performance and correspondence, Eva Moreda Rodriguez's vivid reconception of the role of place and nation in twentieth-century music history will be of particular interest for scholars of Spanish music, Spanish Republican history, and exile and displacement more broadly.

Chapter 1
Rodolfo Halffter and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity

At first sight, Rodolfo Halffter's trajectory in exile may seem an unusual one. A communist, he was among the musicians most actively committed to the Republican cause during the Civil War and the first years in exile in Mexico, and at the same time he quickly managed to build a reputation as a composer and teacher there. Halffter went back to his home country for the first time after the war to take part in a concert of his and his relatives' works in 1963, and from then onwards he visited Spain virtually every year and participated in some of the most prestigious festivals and summer schools organized and sponsored by the Francoist government. About a dozen major works by Halffter were performed in 1960s and 1970s Spain, and they typically met with critical success; the younger generation of Spanish composers – including his nephew, Cristobal Halffter – saw in him a valuable link between the young composers living before the Civil War and themselves, all apparently driven by the same wish to renovate and transform Spanish music. These composers, the critics who supported them and the members of the public institutions in which they found a productive outlet for their music regarded Halffter not simply as a good composer whose music deserved to be performed but also as someone who needed, imperatively, to be reintegrated into Spanish musical life so that Spanish music could catch up and fill the gaps left by the Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime. Such urgency is obvious from the reviews and programmes of some of the events Halffter took part in. For example, when Halffter's Diferencias para orquesta was first performed in Spain on the occasion of the third Festival de Musica de América y España in 1970. Tomás Marco wrote: 'it fills a historical gap that has been quite harmful for Spanish music.'¹

Such gaps were thought to be filled not only through the public performance of works but also through teaching and learning. In 1970, the Festival International de Música y Danza de Granada, one of the most prestigious in Spain, included for the first time a summer school in music performance, composition and musicology under the name Cursos Manuel de Falla. which aimed at 'filling some gaps in music teaching in Spain.'² It was with this aim that some of the most prestigious Spanish composers, critics and performers, such as Sainz de la Maza. Cristóbal Halffter and Enrique Franco, as well as international performers and scholars such as Jacques Chailley and Lélia Gousseau, were invited to the first Cursos in 1970, withRodolfo Halffter joining in 1971.

Halffter's reintegration into Spanish musical life met with surprisingly little opposition. There are no open attacks to be found in the press, while performances of his works were positively reviewed and, it seems, well attended. Yet this does not mean that political issues cannot be flagged up in Halffter's reception under Francoism and his contributions to Spanish culture. Such issues were indeed central, but they did not take the form of censorship or explicit political attacks. Instead, they are most obvious in the difficulties music critics and historians experienced in assimilating Halffter into the narrative of Spanish music as evolution. The reception of Rodolfo Halffter in Francoist Spain, from his first performed work in 1950 to his active participation in musical life during the 1960s and 1970s, illustrates how such narratives took different shapes throughout the dictatorship, configuring not only Spanish music history itself but also the way in which it was linked with the history of Spain more generally. Indeed, such evolutionary narrative has as its basis a linear conception of time that exile challenges:³ in a linear history of Spanish music in which each step takes us closer to an imagined ideal of modernity, where to fit the works and the careers of the exiles? Back in 1936-1939 – that is, the moment they had left Spain – or in the same sequence of temporality in which the Spanish avant-garde was developing? Exile typically poses these kinds of questions, and not only in Spain. It has been described, for example, as an 'unliealable rift'.⁴ an 'anomaly'⁵ or a 'forced interruption'.⁶ Underneath lies the assumption that exile interrupts some kind of organic, natural process.

These problems of temporality were not magically solved by Franco's death, nor are they solely the province of scholars concerned with the historiography of culture. Indeed, in contemporary Spain, it is still difficult to fit the exiles within our existing notions of temporality. Let us look at a recent example. Luis Sunen, a literary and music critic for a number of non-academic publications, writes that Rodolfo Halffter could have been 'one of those musicians who would have had a crucial role in the development of Spanish culture had the blow of the Civil War not put an end to everything.'⁷ The fact that Suñén's article was published in 2000 is relevant here: it was around that year that, according to Layla Renshaw, a rapture took place in memory politics in Spain.⁸ Whereas, Renshaw argues, the 1990s saw a certain emergence of a thus-far practically nonexisting public discourse on Francoist repression in the form of novels and films,⁹ what really brought the issue to the foreground of public opinion was a series of exhumations of Franco's victims at the hands of various local and regional groups brought together under the banner of Asociacion para la Recuperatión de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory).¹⁰ Such exhumations soon became the spearhead of a social movement advocating, more generally, for acknowledgement and reparation for Franco's victims, informed by the perception that the Transición, the transition from Francoism to democracy in the mid- to late 1970s, had failed to provide reparation to the victims of Francoism and hence national reconciliation had not been achieved. A Ley de Memoria Historica (Law of Historical Memory) acknowledging the victims' right to reparation was passed by the Spanish Parliament in 2007, but not everybody in Spain was happy with memoria histórica developments: indeed, the movement has been repeatedly criticized by the right wing on the basis that it seeks to revive rivalries of the past and is not beneficial for national reconciliation.

The original Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, and in part the movement as a whole, has tended to focus on reparation and on the connection with the victimized Republicans as a personal matter,¹¹ but some sectors of the movement such as Foro por la Memoria. have adopted more obviously political-ideological positions. For such sectors, the rupture in Spanish memory politics not only concerned public awareness of Francoist repression, but it also entailed a reconfiguration of the public perceptions of Spanish contemporary history. Whereas narratives of the Transición assumed that the regime had almost seamlessly evolved into parliamentary monarchy thanks to the leadership of the most progressive former officers of successive Franco governments, the memoria histórica movement situated the Republican victims as defenders of democracy, tolerance and compromise, and thus connected them with contemporary Spanish society, with which they allegedly shared these values.¹²

Although sympathetic to the aims of the memoria histórica community's attempts to shed light on the Spanish recent past and recover the memory of Franco's victims, some scholars have pointed out several ways in which the movement might be at risk of reinforcing old tropes or creating new themes concerning Spanish conteinporaiy history that ultimately do not help the cause of the victims.¹³ I would like to point out one such problem that is particularly relevant for exiled musicians (or indeed any other kind of cultural practitioners): namely, the conflation as in Suñén's article, of political and cultural modernization. Politically and ideologically explicit memoria histórica narratives assume that the Spanish Republican exile interrupted a process of modernization, understood as a hegemonic process that encompasses all spheres of the nation. A particularly vivid proof that Francoism and exile are perceived as an abnormal interruption of a natural process is the proliferation of 'what if' stories – what Loureiro has called 'the memory of what didn't happen'.¹⁴ It is assumed, and often fictionalized in a remarkable depth of detail, that, had the exiles stayed in Spain, Spanish cultural life would have been very different.

On a general level, it seems reasonable to agree that culture and the arts in Spain would have followed a rather different direction if Franco had not overthrown the Republican government. However, the issue with such 'what if' stories is that they regard the biographies and careers of the exiles as an organic, inevitable and necessary process inextricably linked with political modernization and, consequently, rendered impossible only by Franco's triumph, rather than as a non-linear path contingent on a number of factors other than the political situation. Such an approach negates the diversity of the exiles' careers abroad (and also, it might be added, of the careers of those composers who stayed in Spain) and instead tries to make sense of them through a narrow understanding of modernity. For example, it is often said of Rodolfo Halffter and Roberto Gerhard (whose case will be discussed in Chapter 3), both of whom wrote serialist music for part of their careers, that their exile prevented Spanish music from developing along specific lines of modernization.¹⁵ This is not the case, for example, with Salvador Bacarisse (discussed in Chapter 2). Bacarisse did not practise serialism; some of his works, such as the guitar concertino, enjoyed a certain success among audiences due to their allegedly more accessible language, which can be read in the light of Bacarisse's concern – which he shared with some of his colleagues of the Grupo de los Ocho – with improving musical culture and education among the Spanish population. Such a concern was informed by Bacarisse's political ideas and it was part of Bacarisse's project of modernity, yet this particular project (and others) is often ignored in favour of the identification of modernity exclusively with specific composition styles such as serialism and atonality. This approach not only ignores the diversity in the careers of Spanish exiled composers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rodolfo Halffter and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity
• 2 Salvador Bacarisse: A ‘Performer’s Composer’ in Exile
• 3 Roberto Gerhard: The Clash of Two National Histories
• 4 The Hispanic Middle Ages under Francoism and in Exile
• 5 Constructing the Intellectual Musician in Francoist Spain
• Conclusion: Exiles and Returns
• Bibliography
• Index