Julián Bautista: an overview

Born in Madrid in 1901, Bautista studied the piano and composition at the Madrid Conservatory, where he met Fernando Remacha and Salvador Bacarisse.Footnote ² The three of them, together with, among others, Gustavo Pittaluga and the brothers Ernesto and Rodolfo Halffter, belonged in the 1920s to a group of young composers who sought to broaden the horizons of contemporary Spanish music. Gathered under the aegis of the critic Adolfo Salazar, who dubbed them the ‘Grupo de los Ocho’ (Group of Eight), they were influenced by impressionism, neoclassicism, and, especially, Falla's renewal of Spanish music. Falla's El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1920) was a decisive influence on the 1921 ballet score Juerga by Bautista, who at the time was also trying his hand at Debussyan impressionism (Colores, 1922; Tres preludios japoneses, 1927) and Stravinskyan neoclassicism (Sonatina-Trío, 1924). Between 1928 and 1932 Bautista focused on film music, before returning to neoclassicism in 1932 with Obertura grotesca and Suite all'antica.Footnote ³

Bautista, like several other composers of his circle, was committed to the progressive ideals of the Second Republic. In the summer of 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government requested his cooperation, using the composer Carlos Palacio as intermediary.Footnote ⁴ In 1937 Bautista became a member of the Consejo Central de la Música (Central Music Council), which regulated musical activities (including music education) in the Republican part of the country. Because of this appointment Bautista had to move to Valencia in southeastern Spain, where the Republican government had been reconstituted. When in late 1938 Bautista was awarded the first prize of the International Chamber Music Competition held in Belgium, he invested the eight thousand francs of prize money in getting to France, where he was initially held at the St Cyprien concentration camp. On his release he travelled to Brussels, from there to Paris, and finally (in 1940) to Buenos Aires, which was already home to a sizeable community of Spanish exiles.

In Argentina Bautista succeeded in integrating himself quickly and seamlessly into the country's musical life, a process in which his friendship with the Argentine composer and conductor Juan José Castro was crucial. He benefited from Falla's help as well: in 1943 Falla asked Castro to replace his own Noches en los jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) with some songs by Bautista at a concert of the Asociación Wagneriana de Buenos Aires, a generous gesture for which Bautista wrote Falla a grateful letter.Footnote ⁵ At the same time Bautista was attracting increasing attention as a film music composer, receiving the prize for best film score from the Academia de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas (Arts and Cinema Academy) of Argentina in 1943 for Cuando florezca el naranjo (When the Orange Tree Flowers, directed by Alberto de Zavalia), and again the following year for Cuando la primavera se equivoca (When Spring Makes a Mistake, directed by Mario Soffici); he was named a member of the Academia in 1944. Meanwhile his prestige as an orchestral and chamber music composer was on the rise, with performances at major concert venues in the city.Footnote ⁶ It was also at about this time that Bautista turned to Spanish myth and history as an inspiration for his work, as will be discussed below.

During these years Bautista was appointed to several short-term advisory roles with musical and cultural institutions in Argentina. The fact that he was included in the Argentine delegation sent to the Festival de Música Latinoamericana held in Caracas in 1957 testifies to his thorough integration into the musical life of his host country. Roberto García Morillo, one of the other delegates, wrote on the occasion of the festival that ‘although of Spanish origin […], maestro Julián Bautista, who has lived here for approximately 20 years, is perfectly assimilated to the Argentine musical movement, of which he is nowadays one of the most qualified representatives’.Footnote ⁷ In support of his claim he argued that Bautista had composed some of ‘his most significant works’ in Argentina: the list included Catro poemas galegos (Four Galician Poems) and Romance del rey Rodrigo (The Romance of King Rodrigo), both discussed later in this article.

At the end of 1959 Bautista was appointed to a professorship in composition at the newly founded Puerto Rico Conservatory, directed by his fellow exile Casals. Bautista commuted between Argentina and Puerto Rico for about a year and a half, until his death in Buenos Aires in July 1961. Since leaving in 1939 he had never again set foot in Spain.Footnote ⁸

The Franco régime, 1939–59: from oblivion to tolerance

For most of the 1940s Bautista and his fellow Republican exiles had been ignored by the Franco régime and its press. Only during the first few months of the dictatorship, when memories of the Spanish Civil War were still raw, were certain exiles subject to direct attacks in the Spanish musical press for what critics saw as their anti-Spanish modernity. In October 1939, barely six months after the end of the conflict, Joaquín Turina, a senior composer who had recently been made director of the Comisaría de la Música (Commission for Music), expressed it thus: ‘The victory of our soldiers has swept away, at least in music, all the modernist mess, but, in doing so, it has created a void that must be filled as soon as possible’.Footnote ⁹ Turina's animosity towards the most innovative composers of the 1920s and 30s was, however, nothing new: during the Second Republic, as music critic of the Catholic newspaper El Debate, he had criticized Bautista for his lack of musical personality, and Rodolfo Halffter for his ‘strange’ dissonances and ‘burlesque’ approach to composition.Footnote ¹⁰

Bautista, like most of his exiled colleagues, was neither criticized by name nor identified with the ‘leftist hordes’, as the critic Antonio de las Heras dubbed the exiles.Footnote ¹¹ Well after the end of the Civil War, Casals was the object of a diatribe on the front page of the newspaper Informaciones because of his ‘anti-Spanish attitude’, but this was the exception rather than the norm.Footnote ¹² It was no doubt the international significance and openly anti-Francoist stance of the cellist that made it necessary for the régime to discredit him openly; the other exiles, Bautista included, did not enjoy the same level of exposure and were therefore spared these attacks.

The initial attitude of the Francoist musical press towards the exiled musicians must be understood in the context of state control and the censorship of music and the press more generally. During the 1940s, rather than explicitly censoring particular composers or idioms, the régime's musical policy was to promote certain musical styles, for example through composition prizes or the creation of the Comisaría de la Música.Footnote ¹³ This led many composers to abandon the more innovative styles typical of the 1920s and 30s in favour of neocasticismo (the tendency represented mainly by Joaquín Rodrigo)Footnote ¹⁴ or, more generally, traditionalist nationalism.

In the musical press, subject at the time to the control of the Delegación Nacional de Prensa of the Falange and to a censorship apparatus, oblivion seems to have been more widely used as a strategy than open attack or interventionism; it is in such a context that the very rare mention of the exiles must be understood. The Falange, initially founded as a fascist party in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, was in full force inside the Franco government from 1939 to 1942, promoting friendship with the Axis countries and controlling the press and educational and cultural policies. Although the influence of the Falange declined from 1942 onwards, the organization still had considerable power in certain areas of public life (such as women's education, youth, and trade unionism), and was still identified, nominally at least, with the régime itself, with Franco being its Jefe Nacional (National Chief).

The Falange also contributed one of the main ideological foundations of Francoism: the ‘mythical notion that the nation's history was an inauthentic deviation from origins’.Footnote ¹⁵ Falangists celebrated the Middle Ages – especially the ‘Reconquista’ (Re-conquest), which had won the Iberian peninsula back from the Muslims and opened the way for the political unification of Spain – as well as the first century of the Spanish Empire (until approximately 1600). Thereafter, it was considered, Spain had started to decline, to deviate from its origins. Franco was portrayed as the leader who could restore Spain's grandeur: his legitimacy was therefore based on myth, understood in the Barthesian sense of a socially constructed reality that is passed off as ‘natural’.Footnote ¹⁶

With regard to the exiles, Francoism evolved from silence at the beginning of the 1940s to a timid politics of tolerance – or even, in some respects, reconciliation – towards the end of the decade. Critics started to report on the activities of exiled composers and performers abroad, though such references were usually very brief and never mentioned the fact that these musicians had fled Spain for political reasons. Similarly, some of the Francoist institutions started to show a slightly friendlier attitude towards exiles: this was the case, for example, with Jaume Pahissa, a composer and biographer of Falla, who was named an honorary member of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando while in exile in Buenos Aires (1951). Pahissa, feeling threatened because of his allegiance to the intellectual, Catalanist, and Republican circles of Barcelona, had left Spain in 1937.Footnote ¹⁷

The same thing happened in other areas of the arts, humanities, and intellectual life, with exiles re-establishing relations with their home country, visiting or even settling in Spain again.Footnote ¹⁸ The relative liberalization of the régime vis-à-vis the Republican exiles must be understood in the context of the initial years of the Cold War, when Franco's government was attempting to gain the United States as an ally and establish its position in the Western bloc. Artistically, the 1950s brought changes to the musical scene as well. Most noticeable, perhaps, was the change in attitudes towards the avant garde. The foundation in 1952 of the association Juventudes Musicales, chaired by the pianist Fernando Ember, was a first step towards a more consistent presence for composers such as Ramón Barce, Luis de Pablo, Antón García Abril, and Cristóbal Halffter in Spanish musical circles. A number of them eventually formed the group Nueva Música in 1958, making the Aula de Música of the Ateneo in Madrid an emblematic venue for the performance of Spanish avant-garde music. Although the avant garde had been regarded with suspicion or indifference by most music critics during the 1940s, it rapidly gained prominence during the 1950s, to the point of being promoted by the music press and the régime as the main new development in Spanish music – demonstrating in the process that Spain, while maintaining its unique artistic personality, was also a modern country, able to play a full part in the Western bloc.Footnote ¹⁹

Another significant event during the 1950s, which shows the change in attitude of the music press, was the visit of Igor Stravinsky to Madrid in March 1955. Stravinsky, who had last come to Spain in 1924, conducted the Orquesta Nacional in a programme of his own works, including the Symphony in Three Movements, Orpheus, and two works performed for the first time in Spain: Scènes de ballet and Ode. Stravinsky's visit to Madrid was heavily publicized, showing that the régime now welcomed and celebrated one of the central representatives of musical modernism. (Although he had been named a fellow of the Instituto de España back in 1939, his music had been controversial among Spanish critics during the 1940s.)

Julián Bautista and Spanish exile studies

During its short existence, the interdisciplinary academic field of exile studies (Exilforschung) has grown up predominantly around the experiences of German émigrés who left their country after Hitler's accession to power. Indeed, and to give just one example, the North American Society for Exile Studies names its primary area of scholarly enquiry ‘the emigration resulting from the terror of Nazi Germany’.Footnote ²⁰ However, politically motivated mass emigration (and particularly the emigration of an intellectual and cultural élite, a phenomenon characteristic of the twentieth century) was not confined to German-speaking lands, and Spanish scholars have recognized this fact in a number of studies reflecting the experience of, in particular, Republican exiles.Footnote ²¹ The six volumes of El exilio español de 1939, edited by José Luis Abellán and published between 1976 and 1978, can be considered a foundational work of Spanish exile studies; since then, the scholarly literature in this area has grown to include thousands of books and articles. Typically the focus has been either on pre-eminent political, intellectual, and artistic personalities or on linguistic or cultural communities, such as the Spaniards held in French concentration camps immediately after the end of the war, or the Basque, Catalan, or Galician exiled communities.

In the arts the focus of Spanish exile studies has been on literature – an understandable emphasis, given that a number of the most prominent twentieth-century poets and novelists were exiled (among them Rafael Alberti, Max Aub, Francisco Ayala, Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas, and Ramón J. Sender). For example, a pioneering collection of essays on the culture of Spanish Republicans in France (Literatura y cultura del exilio español de 1939 en Francia, 1998) includes just three articles that are not about literature, all of which deal with the visual arts as opposed to, say, music or cinema.Footnote ²² There is no doubt that literature enjoys a hegemony in Spanish culture and intellectual life, while music has a more limited role. But another reason for the centrality of literature in Spanish exile studies is perhaps that the experience of displaced Republicans can be conceived not just in terms of exile but also as an example of ‘transtierro’: for José Angel Ascunce, both ‘transtierro’ and exile involve a geographical and political rupture, but, unlike exile, ‘transtierro’ entails linguistic and cultural continuity.Footnote ²³ This was the case with Spanish writers in Latin America, who were able to keep their language and an important part of their culture and thus to become integrated in the literary circles of their host country, which was not necessarily the case, for example, with exiled German writers in English-speaking countries.

One of the leading Spanish experts on the Republican exile, Francisco Caudet, has tried to explain why there is more research on exiled writers than on exiled scientists – who represented a sizeable proportion of the émigré community as well – on the basis that ‘writers need to be in contact with the social fabric about which they write’, and therefore displacement would have a greater impact on a writer than it would on a researcher or scholar.Footnote ²⁴ This somewhat puzzling conclusion, however, does not take into account the fact that environment shapes academic and research work too. Nor does Caudet discuss why musicians have been neglected. Do composers not need to be in contact with their ‘social fabric’, and does displacement therefore not have an impact on their work?

Leaving aside the particularities of the Spanish context, in the broader field of historical musicology exile studies has only recently begun to make a significant contribution. This is partly because of the influence of ethnomusicology, which ‘has increasingly reminded musicologists of the importance of place, just as musicology continues to remind ethnomusicology of the importance of history’.Footnote ²⁵ A further reason has been the continued interest in the history and impact of Nazi cultural policies on a level that transcends the biographies of individuals. Jim Samson has pointed out that the perception and study of exile in music typically swings between two narratives. The narrative of transplantation assumes that everybody belongs to a place (generally, the place in which they were born), and that we subsequently define our identity by ‘constructing our proper place in our present place, which is tantamount to constructing the past in the present’.Footnote ²⁶ This narrative would lead the work of composers in exile to be read as a replication of their experiences in the places of their birth. There seems to be a hint of this in Bautista: while in exile he turned to themes of Spanish history and myth, as will be discussed below. The narrative of acculturation, on the other hand, assumes that ‘we are creatures of the places we inhabit, shaped more by our present than our imagined past’, thus opening up the possibility that exiled composers can become part of the musical life and music history of their host country in their own right. There is a hint of this too in Bautista, in that García Morillo and others considered him an Argentine composer. Bautista's case suggests, therefore, that the two narratives proposed by Samson are not mutually exclusive.

Accounts of the Spanish Republican exile have tended to be shaped by the narrative of transplantation. This tendency was fuelled to a great extent by the arrival of democracy in 1975: it was necessary to represent the Spanish exile in a way that provided an element of reparation to those who had left, to rehabilitate them in Spain after the régime had repeatedly portrayed them as the ‘anti-España’. The transplantation narrative was founded on the assumption that the exiles belonged to Spain after all. But at the same time, as Mari Paz Balibrea has pointed out, it was modelled on a dichotomy of the vanquished and the victors (or victims and oppressors) that stemmed from the aftermath of the Civil War. The trajectories of the Republican exiles, in all their diversity, are thus unified by ‘narratives of flight, of historical ineffectiveness, of sterility, even when they are explained from a position of sympathy with the victim’.Footnote ²⁷ Even if a few, privileged exiles are considered successful in their life trajectories, that is mainly because they were able to return to Spain and to integrate themselves in the democratic state after 1975. Of course, such stories of success were in some cases appropriated by the Spanish government or by local or regional governments following the creation of the ‘estado de las autonomías’ in the early 1980s,Footnote ²⁸ or by the host country's governments, as Sebastiaan Faber explains when describing what he calls ‘interferences’ of ‘official’ or ‘diplomatic’ discourse in Spanish exile studies.Footnote ²⁹ By this he means that many studies of Spanish exiles were commissioned by government institutions in Spain or in the host countries, which proceeded to exaggerate their own role in the harmonious integration of exiles, thus tending to perpetuate rather than challenge existing narratives of exile.

However, in the case of Spain we do not need to wait until post-1975 democracy to observe the reintegration of émigrés into the cultural and intellectual life of the country. Specifically in music, during the late 1940s and 1950s we find examples of individuals (such as Adolfo Salazar, Jaume Pahissa, or Bautista himself) being approached by the régime. It might be argued that such attempts to reassimilate exiled composers were isolated and confined to the private sphere, rather than systematic and openly celebrated, but even then they had to be supported by particular narratives that have not yet been sufficiently explained by scholarly research. During its early years the Franco régime relied strongly on a rhetoric of purification, which called for a purging of those elements it considered detrimental to the historical and spiritual self-realization of the nation.Footnote ³⁰ Why did the same régime start to reintegrate some of these detrimental elements as it entered its second decade, and what changed in order to make this reintegration possible?

Musicology and the Spanish exile

Historians of Spanish music have engaged to a certain extent with the phenomenon of displacement and the questions it poses. This is the case, for example, with Falla scholars such as Carol A. Hess in her biography of the composer, and Jorge de Persia, who has also uncovered interesting information on the composer's final years in Argentina, though his study is focused on archival research rather than on interpreting or redefining the concept of displacement in the history of Spanish music.Footnote ³¹ But, as other recent studies dealing with Falla's emigration have shown, to classify him as a political exile is somewhat problematic, owing to his alleged apoliticism and the fact that he always claimed financial and health reasons rather than political motivations for remaining in Argentina.Footnote ³² Christiane Heine has been one of the few scholars of Spanish music to use exile as a central category of analysis (albeit very briefly) in her research on the composer Fernando Remacha.Footnote ³³ Remacha moved from Madrid to his home town of Tudela in Northern Spain after the end of the war. He abandoned composition for almost twenty years until his appointment as director of the Pamplona Conservatory in 1957, a fact that has led Heine to regard him as an internal exile who chose to turn his back on music and musical life for political reasons during Franco's first two decades in power.

Many stories of the Spanish exile still have to be told, analysed, and compared, including those not only of the best-known musicians, such as Casals and Roberto Gerhard (a Catalan who settled in Cambridge),Footnote ³⁴ but also of figures such as Rodolfo Halffter, Jesús Bal y Gay, and Salvador Bacarisse (the former two exiled in Mexico and the latter in Paris), who demonstrated different degrees of political engagement. Figures in popular music were also affected, the best-known example probably being the copla singer Miguel de Molina, who was persecuted both for performing to the Republican troops during the war and for his homosexuality, and who went into exile in Buenos Aires in 1942. However, what remains insufficiently explored in the case of exiled musicians is the extent of their rehabilitation in the culture of their homeland at a time when many of them, such as Rodolfo Halffter and Adolfo Salazar in Mexico or Salvador Bacarisse in France, had already become active contributors to the musical and intellectual life of their host countries. This phenomenon poses a number of questions. First of all, can we speak of reintegration when most of the exiles, while they may have resumed cultural relations of some sort and even travelled back to their home country, did not physically settle in Spain again, at least not before Franco's death? Is ‘acceptance’ the word that best defines the change of attitude towards the exiles in the late 1940s, or would it be more fitting to speak of ‘tolerance’? And to what extent was the régime interested in appropriating the exiles’ work for self-validation rather than for its own artistic merit?

Histories of music: approaching Bautista from 1957 onwards

After eighteen years of absence from Spain Julián Bautista was little more than an obscure name for all those Spanish composers, musicians, and music critics who had started their careers after the Civil War. Evidence of this is provided by Federico Sopeña's letter to him of 31 October 1957:

Sopeña had started his career as a music critic in 1939, at only twenty-two years of age, under the auspices of the Falange; he had not had the chance to meet the composers active during the 1920s and 30s who had gone into exile after the start of the Civil War. Bautista duly replied to his request, sending Sopeña some concert programmes, scores, and other information, and he was included in Sopeña's Historia de la música española contemporánea the following year, a book whose chronology began with the return of Falla and Turina to Madrid in 1914, after their formative years in Paris, and ended with the younger generation active in the 1950s. The book project was clearly modelled on La música contemporánea en España by the critic Adolfo Salazar, for whom Sopeña felt profound admiration, even though Salazar was himself a Republican exile. In modelling his work after Salazar's, it is understandable that Sopeña wanted to end his account with the so-called Generación de la República (Generation of the Republic), most of whom were living in exile by 1957.

The way in which Bautista was presented by Sopeña – as part of a musical generation rather than as a valuable composer in his own right – is in itself symptomatic of the terms under which Bautista and several of his fellow exiles were rehabilitated from the 1950s onwards. Traditionally, Spanish literary studies have tended to split writers and literary trends into generations – the Generación del 1898, the Generación del 1914, the Generación del 1927, and so forth. The years that identify each of the various generations do not refer to the approximate year of birth of their members, but rather to the year in which, being between roughly thirty and forty-five years of age, they reached literary or intellectual maturity. This follows José Ortega y Gasset's concept of generation, defined as a cultured minority whose members share the same historical time and space, are of a similar age, have a degree of contact with one other, and are sensitive to the historical circumstances in which they live.Footnote ³⁶ The historiography of Spanish music has also tended to group composers into generations, starting from the so-called Generación de los Maestros (Generation of the Masters) – referring to composers born between 1870 and 1880, such as Falla and Turina – and finishing with the Generación del 1951, formed by composers such as Cristóbal Halffter and Luis de Pablo. Salazar had included Bautista in his Generación de la República, along with Ernesto and Rodolfo Halffter, Salvador Bacarisse, Fernando Remacha, Juan José Mantecón, Rosa García Ascot, and Gustavo Pittaluga. Sopeña, on the other hand, coined the name Generación del 1931 to refer not only to Bautista, Bacarisse, Pittaluga, Remacha, and Rodolfo Halffter, but also to composers who were not part of Salazar's Republican generation, such as Enrique Casals Chapí and Federico Elizalde. While Sopeña did not explain why he rejected the name Generación de la República, it is likely that he wished to avoid reference to the Second Republic, which had been constantly demonized by the régime in order to uphold Franco's legitimacy, and chose instead to make a more opaque reference to 1931, the year in which the Second Republic was proclaimed.

In his Historia Sopeña paid less attention to the particularities of Bautista's compositional output than to what he perceived to be his generation's contribution to the history of Spanish music. Indeed he kept his discussions of individual composers consistently to a minimum in order to focus instead on their collective role as a generation. The book upholds the idea that the history of Spanish music is one of forward-moving progress, involving both powerful leaders, such as Falla and Rodrigo, and minor figures who nonetheless serve specific and necessary functions in the advancement of musical composition. The Generación del 1931, according to Sopeña, played its part by displaying ‘a shared attitude of joy and wit’ and by creating ‘a somewhat feverish environment, more or less mixed with politics, in which novelties replaced each other happily’Footnote ³⁷ – hence their contribution as composers is subordinated to their function as cultural agitators. Writing at a time at which the régime had become somewhat more liberal but the issue of post-Civil-War retaliation was still taboo, Sopeña missed the opportunity of discussing the impact of exile on this generation. Instead, he simply wrote that the group ‘lost its roots, and also the opportunity to transmit a message in the very years in which one should not be resting on one's laurels’. Sopeña was alluding to the fact that many of this generation were in their late thirties or early forties, and hence had not yet reached artistic maturity, when they went into exile; he therefore concluded that exile had truncated their development.Footnote ³⁸

After Sopeña's letter to Bautista, there is evidence that officials of the Franco government tried to get Bautista's cooperation on at least two occasions before his death. The first was in July 1959, when Gonzalo Puente Ojea, the Spanish consul in the Argentine city of Mendoza, invited him to conduct a concert of Spanish music at the consulate, an offer which Bautista politely rejected, insisting that he was ‘not a conductor’ and, moreover, was not in good health.Footnote ³⁹ In the same year the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera attended the annual festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, held in Rome; there he met Antonio Iglesias, director of the Comisaría de la Música, and the music critic Enrique Franco, who asked Ginastera to pass word to Bautista that the commission would like to include one of his works at a chamber music festival, ‘probably in Compostela’ (referring to the ‘Música en Compostela’ summer school and festival).Footnote ⁴⁰ Ginastera passed Bautista's postal address on to Iglesias and Franco; however, neither the Archivo Julián Bautista nor the McCann Collection holds evidence of any communication between Bautista and the Comisaría de la Música.

After Bautista's death

When Bautista died on 8 July 1961, the obituaries published in Argentina followed García Morillo in treating him as a full member of Argentine musical life. Enzo Valenti Ferro wrote that ‘one of the most prominent figures of the Argentine musical movement has died’, and that ‘Spain lost [him] twenty years ago and the Argentine musical community has now lost him for ever’.Footnote ⁴¹ Even a quarter century later in 1986, the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death went almost unnoticed in Spain, but it was marked with a concert at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires as part of a series of events designed to commemorate Spanish exiles in Argentina.Footnote ⁴²

Bautista's death had not been widely reported in the Spanish press back in 1961. The music magazine Ritmo simply reproduced Valenti Ferro's obituary from Buenos Aires Musical, while the weekly Blanco y negro published a short notice two days after his death and an extended article by Federico Sopeña one month later.Footnote ⁴³Arriba published a long obituary by Enrique Franco.Footnote ⁴⁴ Sopeña in his obituary returned to the idea that Bautista's generation had perhaps not been very significant musically, but had instead fulfilled a historical role and plugged a gap in the history of Spanish music. He wrote that ‘Thirty years ago, Bautista was part of the avant garde: an avant garde necessary for Madrid, but perhaps artificial abroad’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In writing thus, Sopeña seemed to suggest that the role of this avant garde was mainly to provide a further link in the chain of Spanish musical development: his comment that this avant garde was ‘necessary’ reinforces the vision of Spanish music history as evolutionary, while the remark that it was ‘artificial abroad’ suggested that its legacy was of parochial interest and, therefore, of little lasting musical worth.

Enrique Franco echoed Sopeña's reservations concerning the purely musical contribution made by the Generación de la República, whose output he considered ‘a mere reflection of many other things’;Footnote ⁴⁶ however, he acknowledged their role in the modernization of Spanish music. Enrique Franco's obituary reflects the need, noted above in connection with the centrality of the Generación del 1951 in Spanish music criticism of the 1950s, to construct a genealogy into which these composers can be inserted. Indeed, in many respects (for example, their interest in adapting European avant-garde trends to Spanish music) it is easier to connect the 1951 generation with exiled composers such as Bautista or Gerhard than with the neocasticismo of Rodrigo or José Muñoz Molleda that was prevalent in 1940s Spain.

The first Festival de Música de América y España

In 1964 the régime gave a clearer sign that it was ready to reassimilate Bautista, together with other exiled composers, within the narrative of Spanish music. That year saw the first Festival de Música de América y España (American and Spanish Music Festival), held in Madrid and organized by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica,Footnote ⁴⁷ with the support of the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs, National Education, and Information and Tourism. More than sixty Spanish and American (including North American) composers, some of whom travelled to Madrid for the event, had their works performed by one of five participating orchestras. The programme included several European premières and twelve world premières. 1964 was a highly significant year for the régime: apart from the Festival, a number of other events took place to commemorate the ‘twenty-five years of peace’ that Franco had allegedly brought to the country. Another example is the ‘Concierto de la Paz’ (Concert of Peace), organized by the Ministry for Information and Tourism, which included works by representatives of the new Spanish avant garde, such as Miguel Alonso, Luis de Pablo, and Cristóbal Halffter. It was therefore a crucial moment for the régime to redefine itself before both its citizens and the rest of the world.

Spain, as the host country, was represented by sixteen composers, with Falla taking a principal role: the festival started with a talk by Enrique Franco under the title ‘Manuel de Falla between America and Spain’ and was complemented by an exhibition on Falla's life. Falla's reputation as the dominant figure of contemporary Spanish music was therefore consolidated, while at the same time his role as a mediator between Spain and America made him an appropriate figurehead for the festival. The others represented ranged from Falla's contemporaries to the younger generation, the Generación del 51, who had started to experiment with European avant-garde trends from the 1950s onwards. The generation of exiled pre-Civil-War composers was represented by Rodolfo Halffter, Gerhard, and Bautista.Footnote ⁴⁸ Given the significance of the festival, this clearly suggests a reintegration of the exiles into the musical panorama from which they had been absent since 1939. But this seems to have come with certain provisos, the first being that the circumstances of their exile had to be discussed as little as possible. The programme of the festival, for example, simply mentions that Bautista ‘moved to Buenos Aires in 1940’, a formula typical in the Francoist press when referring to exiles. They simply ‘lived abroad’, with no mention whatsoever of the circumstances that had led them to do so.

The second proviso concerns the selection of works by exiled composers: Bautista's Obertura grotesca, written in 1932 and awarded a composition prize by Unión Radio, and Rodolfo Halffter's Violin Concerto, written in 1939–41, were both several decades old by 1964. This was not the case, however, with the work chosen to represent Ernesto Halffter, a member of the same generation: his Canticum in memoriam P.P. Johannem XXIII had been composed in 1964, and it received some of the most enthusiastic reviews of the festival in the Spanish press. The exiled composers were thus represented not by their most recent output but by works they had written long ago, before exile had irreversibly shaped their music. Their presence was acceptable for the purposes of filling in the gap that exile had left in the narrative of twentieth-century Spanish music between the 1920s and 1939, but they could not be seen to be contributing further to the shaping of post-Civil-War music history – unlike Ernesto Halffter who spent the Civil War in Lisbon but was reintegrated into Spanish musical life as early as 1940, when he returned to conduct Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Pedro's Puppet Show) at the invitation of the Comisaría de Música.

In the case of Roberto Gerhard a more recent work was chosen: his Second Quartet, composed in 1961. However, critics largely portrayed it as a sort of fossil from past times, reminiscent of the composer's Schoenbergian, pre-exile youth: ‘Nowadays, Gerhard's Second Quartet feels, perhaps, older than other works that try to be less innovative’, wrote the critic Antonio Fernández-Cid.Footnote ⁴⁹ He minimized Gerhard's ‘discoveries’ in this quartet by arguing that they copied Bartók's innovations of the 1910s and 20s. At the time serialism was by no means scandalous or even new to Spanish music critics: during the 1940s and early 50s composers such as Joaquim Homs and Gerardo Gombau had tried their hand at it, though their efforts attracted little attention from the musical press. However, this changed from the mid to late 1950s onwards, when composers of the Generación del 51, notably Cristóbal Halffter, started to experiment with serialism. In this context Gerhard's Second Quartet was unlikely to be read as too innovative or scandalous. However, in emphasizing the work's connections with Schoenberg and Bartók, Fernández-Cid neatly separated Gerhard from the younger generation residing in Spain: unlike Cristóbal Halffter or Luis de Pablo, Gerhard was considered not an innovator but rather an imitator of already old-fashioned trends. This put him in a rather similar position to Bautista and Rodolfo Halffter: their works were interesting as testimony to the evolution of Spanish music, as a link in the evolutionary chain from Falla to the Generación del 51, but not on account of their current significance or lasting musical value.

Coinciding with the festival in 1964, the composer Luis de Pablo published an article on Bautista and his significance for the history of Spanish music in the magazine Aulas, published by the Service of Culture and Education of the Falange.Footnote ⁵⁰ He stated that Bautista had had ‘substantial influence on the evolutionary progress of Spanish music’ (italics mine); Bautista and Rodolfo Halffter, as generational contemporaries but from different perspectives, had confronted ‘the issue of the aggiornamento’ of Spanish music. De Pablo, therefore, followed Sopeña in highlighting Bautista's contribution to Spanish music in terms of innovations or advances. He and Sopeña were the most vocal figures when it came to reclaiming a place for Bautista in the pantheon of twentieth-century Spanish music, De Pablo writing that he had been ‘unjustly ignored’ and that ‘his output is among the most important in Spanish music of recent years’. In analysing Bautista's Second Symphony, he likened the composer to Schoenberg in his ‘concern for achieving large-scale form’. De Pablo was right in pointing out that Spanish composers had rarely cultivated extended forms, such as the sonata or the symphony, something that differentiated the history of Spanish music from the German and French musical traditions; his defence of Bautista as an innovator can therefore be considered justified to some extent. Bautista is again considered almost exclusively in terms of what he had been able to contribute to Spanish music, but De Pablo's vindication went beyond that of other commentators in that he actively reclaimed Bautista's music as ‘among the most important in Spanish music of recent years’. Sopeña, on the other hand, did not reclaim only Bautista but also – albeit selectively – a whole generation of displaced Spanish musicians, including Salazar, Halffter, Pahissa, and Falla,Footnote ⁵¹ all of whom, he reminded the reader, he had already included in his Historia de la música contemporánea back in 1958: ‘I deemed it essential to include these names, because they are a symbol of both success and tragedy’.Footnote ⁵² He even made a pioneering attempt to analyse Bautista's work with exile as a central category, writing that ‘loneliness and nostalgia created in him a need to return to nationalist criteria’ in such works as Suite all'antica or Catro poemas galegos.

It is significant that both Sopeña and De Pablo were associated with the Falange, Sopeña, as we have seen, from his early career, and De Pablo as contributor to the magazine Aulas, published by the Delegación Nacional of the Falange. In spite of his career during the Franco régime, in which he held important offices and posts, Sopeña portrayed himself as a ‘Falange Liberal’,Footnote ⁵³ a member of a subset of the Falange that was trying to avoid a rupture in the intellectual tradition that had its roots in the Second Republic by reclaiming anti-Francoist intellectuals, a tendency observable in the Falange Liberals’ publication Escorial.Footnote ⁵⁴ In his two books of memoirsFootnote ⁵⁵ Sopeña portrayed the Falange Liberals as a faction that opposed the prevailing cultural policies of Francoism, almost as a kind of internal resistance, which is puzzling in view of the fact that the Falange effectively controlled the régime's cultural and information policies at that time.

However, even if we are tempted to take at face value Sopeña's claim that the Falange Liberals were trying to revive the liberal tradition of Spanish culture, the claim is not without its problems. Santos Juliá has argued that the term ‘Falange Liberal’ is in itself an oxymoron, because ‘fascism is not simply the opposite of liberalism, it negates liberalism’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Furthermore, for Juliá, this alleged liberalism, which amounted to rehabilitating intellectuals of opposing political views but of excellent artistic calibre, has itself profoundly fascist roots. It recalls the situation in Italy, when in 1925–6 Giovanni Gentile tried to rally the non-fascist intellectuals under the banner of ‘national culture’. It was thus a matter of ‘destroying one's enemies by absorbing them’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This aspect of the Falange's policy caused clashes with the Catholic groups Acción Española and Opus Dei, which advocated the intellectual destruction of rivals, but, as Juliá notes, only in retrospect might the Falange's stance be mistaken for liberalism: ‘Once they were stripped of power, and more than ten years after the reference point of fascism had disappeared, that cultural policy which had consisted of trying to understand the thinking of the defeated, purify it, and assimilate it in a common, totalitarian project could be interpreted only in terms of openness and liberalization’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the Falange Liberal project was dismantled in the mid-1940s, when the Falange lost its hegemony within the Francoist government, especially in the realms of culture and the press, Bautista's reception suggests that, fifteen years on, writers and publications linked to the Falange remained the keenest to reclaim the exiles. However, as Juliá points out, this must be interpreted not as a matter of national reconciliation but rather of the recovery of those exiles who had something to contribute to the Francoist project.

The second Festival de América y España

The second Festival de Música de América y España was held in 1967, again in Madrid. At the first festival Bautista's Obertura grotesca had received generally positive but extremely brief and by no means enthusiastic reviews;Footnote ⁵⁹ it was a short piece and it shared a concert with four other works, some of which generated far more interest, which explains why the Obertura grotesca went relatively unnoticed.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1967, however, his Catro poemas galegos was one of the most favourably reviewed works of the festival, and was also enthusiastically received by the audience.Footnote ⁶¹ Iglesias compared him to the later Falla and praised the work's ‘accurate’ recreation of the medieval universe, whereas Fernández-Cid wrote ‘What a great musician Julián Bautista was!’, and stated that Bautista's widow had received overwhelming ovations as she addressed the audience at the end of the concert.

Whereas the Obertura grotesca had been composed in the years of the Republic, Catro poemas galegos reflected the influence of displacement on Bautista's work; indeed, it was only after his exile that Bautista turned to themes of national myth, which had been absent from his previous creative output. The Catro poemas galegos and the Fantasía española for clarinet and orchestra were, respectively, the first chamber and symphonic works Bautista composed shortly after going into exile in 1945–6, and both explore national themes. During the late 1940s he was also working on a myth-based cantata, entitled Cantar del Mio Cid, which remained incomplete. Absorbed by his film music commissions, Bautista did not compose any other concert works until 1956–8, when he wrote his last four works: Sinfonía breve, Romance del rey Rodrigo (a work which, as discussed below, is based on an epic poem of key national significance), Sinfonía ricordiana, and the Third String Quartet. National and mythical subjects, therefore, became a central component of Bautista's output only after he had left Spain, and he was not the only exile to follow such an evolution: Salvador Bacarisse and especially Roberto Gerhard, who started to introduce flamenco in his compositions only after going into exile,Footnote ⁶² constitute similar examples. Therefore, although I have previously named myth as one of the main ideological pillars of Francoism, the exiles also used it as a strategy for conferring legitimacy on their own project – which, like that of Franco, was still heavily dependent on ideas of pan-Hispanic grandeur and cultural hegemony over the Spanish-speaking nations of Latin America, even though they had become the host countries of many exiles.Footnote ⁶³

At least one of Bautista's ‘mythical’ works has been read in this light. Bautista's choral setting Romance del rey Rodrigo is based on the fifteenth-century oral poetry collection Romancero, which in turn draws on a selection of Spanish medieval epic poems.Footnote ⁶⁴ The legend of King Rodrigo narrates the defeat of the last Visigoth king of Spain by invading Muslims, who had formed an alliance with an internal enemy of the king, Count Don Julián. The work is based on medieval Spanish texts and, as such, reproduces the traditional perspective on the myth, in which the enemies, with the exception of Don Julián, are external aggressors. Jorge de Persia, however, has attempted to read the work as a veiled attack on Franco: the first movement of the work, ‘Imprecación’, repeats the words ‘Mother Spain, / oh, poor mother Spain! / you are all being burnt / by a perverse traitor’. These words, in De Persia's opinion, refer not to Don Julián but rather to the ‘traitor’ Franco, who rebelled against the legitimate Republican government in 1936.

De Persia's reading certainly fits well with the two other works that will be discussed below, Cantar del Mio Cid and Catro poemas galegos. It also mirrors Bautista's commitment to the Republican ideals that had forced him to leave Spain at the end of the Civil War and his collaborations with such prominent anti-Francoists as Casals and Rafael Alberti. However, one should also note that, by cultivating the romance form, Bautista was inserting himself into the Argentine as much as the Spanish tradition: early modern romances made their way to South America during the conquest and were still very much alive in popular culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Romance del rey Rodrigo must therefore be read not only as expressing nostalgia for the home country but also as a contribution to the culture of Bautista's host nation.

Bautista's Cantar del Mio Cid, planned as a work for choir and seven soloists, was to be based on the eponymous medieval epic poem, with texts from the original source especially rewritten by the exiled poet Rafael Alberti. All that has survived of the work is a copy of Alberti's texts with annotations by Bautista, now held at the Archivo Julián Bautista. The myth of El Cid had obvious resonances for the Franco régime: the medieval flavour, the fight against Islam, and the unification of various Christian communities under a strong and honest leader (the Cid himself), who had been unjustly banned by the King of Castile. However, it can be argued that the legend had interesting connotations for the exiles as well: Alberti's adaptation opens – as does the poem – with the exile of El Cid, who has been banned from Castile by the king but is being followed and supported by many among both the aristocracy and the common people. The first of the three movements, as indicated in Bautista's annotated text, was to be called ‘El destierro’ (The Banning). The theme of exile is repeated in the third and last movement (‘Muerte del Cid’), in which El Cid dies having demonstrated his honesty and loyalty, in return for which he had been not only repatriated and reconciled with the king but also accorded a higher social position, with his daughters married off to the kings of Navarre and Aragón.

Historical myth is also the foundation of Catro poemas galegos. However, this work deviates from the two preceding examples in that its mythical aspect concerns the legitimacy and status not of Spain as a nation but of Galicia. Catro poemas galegos was based on a set of four poems by Lorenzo Varela, themselves based on engravings by Luís Seoane. Both Varela and Seoane were prominent Galician nationalists exiled in Buenos Aires. Between 1939 and the 1960s the Argentine capital was home to a number of individuals who can similarly be defined as Galician nationalists, but who had rather different backgrounds. Some of them, like Seoane and Varela, were artists, intellectuals, or politicians who had fled Spain as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War. Others, such as the writer Eduardo Blanco Amor, had come to Buenos Aires before 1939, mainly for financial reasons. A third and younger group arrived in the late 1940s and 1950s, attracted by both the job opportunities and the political and cultural climate of the country. This community in Buenos Aires, following the tradition of Galician nationalism established in the late nineteenth century, agitated for increased self-government and autonomy for the region, and reclaimed its history and culture (including the Galician language) as the markers that identified it as a nation in its own right.

Varela and Seoane focused on four historical figures traditionally reclaimed by Galician nationalists against the hegemony of Spanish myth, heavily centred on Castile:Footnote ⁶⁵ María Pita (the only non-medieval figure of the series), a seventeenth-century urban heroine who repelled Sir Francis Drake's attack on Coruña; Ruy Xordo, who commanded a revolt against a feudal lord in the fifteenth century; María Balteira, a prostitute frequently named in Galician medieval cantigas; and Adaúlfo, a bishop who survived an ordeal after being charged with homosexuality. However, although Varela was consciously making use of indigenous myths that had long kept alive the vision of an autonomous Galicia,Footnote ⁶⁶ his poems do not explicitly oppose Galicia and Spain, which would be anathema to the Francoist tenet of the indissoluble unity of Spain. It was for this reason that Bautista's songs could still be safely included in a high-profile event such as the Festival de Música de América y España and celebrated for their medieval flavour; in isolation, in a context in which nationalist claims from Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque Country were ignored or repressed, they could easily be read as mere celebrations of picturesque historical figures rather than nation-building myths.