At the age of 24 — a time of life when musical careers normally are beginning in earnest — Montsalvatge's had been stranded by total war. Some of the then-unprecedented cruelties of the Civil War are often thought of as a rehearsal for the Second World War, and the German, Italian, and Soviet governments saw their allies in Spain as part of their own larger purposes. At the same time, many foreign democrats saw Spain as the first active chance to fight fascism. The governments of France and Great Britain stayed aloof officially, though their general anti-fascist posture was signaled by their declared will to resist territorial ambitions of Germany and Italy. But they and the United States government also turned a blind eye when, for example, the Ford Motor Company sold war goods to the Nationalists. The situation was further complicated by the beginning of Franco's four-decade representation of himself as a bulwark against the spread of totalitarian Communism to Spain.

The troubles for musicians were hardly over at the cessation of actual military confrontation that came with the complete surrender of the Republican forces on April 1, 1939.

With his return to what they call the Ciutat Condal, Montsalvatge started in earnest on his path of becoming a leading voice for the criticism and connoisseurship of music in Barcelona. He appeared in the pages of Destino as one who wrote with authority. His friend and editor wrote later: