Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) was a Catalan-born composer, musical scholar, and writer. Gerhard (who only consistently adopted the form ‘Roberto’ after he was exiled from Spain) was the son of a German-Swiss father and an Alsatian mother. Born Robert Juan Rene Gerhard on 25th September 1896 in Valls, Catalonia, he was predisposed to an international, multilingual outlook, but by birth and culture he was a Catalan. He studied piano with Enrique Granados and composition with the great scholar-composer Felipe Pedrell, teacher of Isaac Albéniz, Granados, and Manuel de Falla. When Pedrell died in 1922, Gerhard tried unsuccessfully to become a pupil of Falla and considered studying with Charles Koechlin in Paris, but then approached Arnold Schoenberg who, on the strength of a few early compositions, accepted him as his only Spanish pupil. Gerhard spent several years with Schoenberg in Vienna and Berlin. Returning to Barcelona in 1928, 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 Webern to Barcelona, and was the principal organizer of the 1936 ISCM Festival there. He also collected, edited and performed folksongs and old Spanish music from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Identified with the Republican cause throughout the Spanish Civil War (as musical adviser to the Minister of Fine Arts in the Catala

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