Gerhard Roberto – La Muerte y la donzella
from ‘Cantares’ (1956) – Seven Spanish songs for voice and guitar
Robert Gerhard i Ottenwaelder (25 September 1896 – 5 January 1970) is a Spanish Catalan composer and musical scholar and writer, generally known outside Catalonia as Roberto Gerhard.
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.
