Composer; born 15 September 1896, Valls, Catalonia, died 5 January 1970, Cambridge.
Biography
Roberto Gerhard was born in Catalonia to a German/Swiss father and a mother originally from Alsace. He studied piano with Granados and composition with Felipe Pedrell. In the 1920s he spent several years studying with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin. He returned to Barcelona in 1928 and became an important advocate of contemporary music in Catalonia and beyond. Among his friends were Pablo Casals and Joan Miro.
As a republican, Gerhard had to emigrate in 1939. He settled in Cambridge and continued to write major works in England, including the ballet Don Quixote which was produced at Covent Garden, and the opera The Duenna which was broadcast by the BBC.
In the 1950s Gerhard became one of the first composers in England to explore the possibilities of electronic music. Catalan culture remained at the centre of his work, but despite his increasingly international reputation Spain remained closed to him as a composer until the end of his life.
Links and sources
Roberto Gerhard on Wikipedia
Roberto Gerhard Archive at Cambridge University Library
Roberto Gerhard at Boosey & Hawkes
Roberto Gerhard official website
Roberto Gerhard Digital Archive – Heritage Quay, University of Huddersfield. The Gerhard Revealed resource makes available the audio recordings of Gerhard’s electronic music uncovered as part of the original AHRC-funded project in the form of a website and an online searchable and listenable database along with photographs.
Further Reading
Adkins Monty and Rachel E Mann. 2022. Roberto Gerhard: Re-Appraising a Musical Visionary in Exile First ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Adkins Monty and Michael Russ. 2017. Essays on Roberto Gerhard. Newcastle upon Tyne UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Adkins Monty and Michael Russ. 2016. The Roberto Gerhard Companion. London: Taylor and Francis.
Alonso Tomás, Diego. “A Heretic in the Schoenberg Circle: Roberto Gerhard's First Engagement with Twelve-Tone Procedures in Andantino.” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 3 (2019): 557–88. doi:10.1017/S1478572219000306.
Gerhard, Roberto and Bowen Meirion, Gerhard on Music: Selected Writings (London: Routledge, 2019), doi:10.4324/9781315200583.
