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‘Soirées de Barcelone’: towards a performing version
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2016
Extract
These observations form a long-delayed epilogue to my article ‘Soirées de Barcelone: a Preliminary Report’ in Tempo 139 (December 1981), where I outlined the history of Roberto Gerhard's Catalan ballet, a major score which was then (and remains now) virtually unknown save for the performance of some excerpts. For the work's conception, and its commission from Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, readers should consult that article, and the article by Julian White in the present issue. This was the work-in-progress – apparently still at that stage bearing its original title Les Feux de la Saint Jean – which Gerhard took with him when the climax of the Spanish Civil War and the fall of the Republic forced him into exile in France in January 1939. He continued to work on it during the following five months he spent in Paris and Meudon.
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References
1 According to Gerhard's widow Poldi (conversation, 19 October 1981 in Cambridge) this was suggested by Ventura Gassol, author of the scenario; though it is unclear whether the title-change involved a proposal anachronistically to relocate the ballet's folkloric action in Catalonia's capital.
2 All the manuscript material forms part of the Gerhard archive at Cambridge University Library, under the call-sign Gerhard 1.15.
3 The first page of the ink score carries a bracketted ‘1938’, but this is evidently a late addition, probably in Poldi Gerhard's hand.
4 PS could have served as a composing draft, but its pianistic intentions are patent. It could also have provided the basis of a proper reduction for rehearsals (which might themselves have necessitated further changes in the ballet's form); but more likely – since the de Basil production evaporated long before rehearsals were contemplated – it arose at an earlier stage of the project, to give de Basil, Massine, Dorati, Miró and any other interested parties a fairly clear idea of what the work involved. It is known that shortly after his arrival in this country Gerhard played through Soirées de Barcelone at Covent Garden in an attempt to arouse interest in a London production. In all probability PS is what he played.
Smith, Sydney, in his memoir ‘The War Years in Cambridge’ (London Sinfonietta Schoenberg-Gerhard Series programme book, 1973, p. 99)Google Scholar mentions that on 2 December 1939, at the University Music Club, Gerhard performed a composition ‘specially arranged for piano solo’ and programmed as A Suite from a New Ballet (M.S.). Smith identifies this work as Gerhard's earlier ballet Ariel (1934), but as no piano reduction of Ariel seems to have come to light (nor would that work easily lend itself to suite-making) one is tempted to speculate that his memory played him false and Gerhard was in fact playing numbers from the PS of Soirées de Barcelone, certainly in that year a ‘New Ballet’.
5 Pages 1–2 of this sequence would seem to be a single separate sheet, its sides so numbered, that carries a draft of the coda for the preceding section.
6 To be precise, 5′50″. The 4′55″ of Jordi Masó (Marco Polo 8.223867) is certainly too fast.
7 I detect echoes of it in at least two later Gerhard works – the final section of Pedrelliana and the ‘Folia’ finale of the Concerto for piano and strings. Indeed its function in the ballet may be felt to parallel the coda of the Homenaje a Pedrell Symphony, where at the end of the Pedrelliana movement Gerhard steps clear of an ‘assumed style’ – there Pedrell's personal idiom, here folkloristic stylization – to speak in his own voice.