Recent interest in and institutional support for the personal archives of Spanish Republican exiles can be a double-edged sword for researchers: on the one hand, they have made a plethora of sources – not least correspondence – available; on the other, these sources are sometimes difficult to reconcile with widespread tropes about exile – some of them generic, some of them specific to the Spanish Republican exile. The very notion of exile is dependent on national canons, but at the same time it is difficult to accommodate exile within such canons – exile is, as Fernando Larraz has put it, ‘an anomaly’.Footnote ¹ While scholars acknowledge that an exile can ultimately acculturate to his or her new milieu and achieve professional and personal success (Kurt Weill is perhaps the best-known example),Footnote ² we tend also to believe that this success will always be diminished in some way because of the exile's disconnection from his or her home country. This limitation acquires a special meaning in the case of the Spanish Republican exile. In the reformist climate of the Second Republic (1931–6), many, if not most, exiles had put their intellectual and artistic pursuits to the service of political activism in favour of the Republican project. Leaving Spain meant not only leaving family, friends and professional connections behind; the exiles also had to reshape their very conception of their intellectual or artistic activity, since it could no longer have the same political role it used to have during the Republic.

Scholars have often translated this alleged disconnection between the exilic community and Spain as ineffectiveness – that is, they operate under the notion that the exiles could no longer make any contribution to the artistic and intellectual life of their home country after they left Spain. For example, it is a common assumption that the reflections of exiles on contemporary Spanish arts and politics were of only limited value because their authors had been cut off from Spain since 1939 and therefore could not possibly know what was going on under Francoism.Footnote ³ In some cases, this narrative of disconnection and ineffectiveness is framed as the exiles’ choice: the intellectual historian Jordi Gracia, for example, has argued that contacts between the exiles and Spain during the 1950s ‘deactivated the temptation to return in almost all cases and, logically, the émigrés preferred to remain in exile’.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, this disconnection is posited as extending beyond Francoism and into the democratic period, when some of the exiles returned to find a country that had little to do with the one they had left behind or had imagined. The experience of these exiles is typically conceptualized, in the words of Mari Paz Balibrea, as ‘narratives of flight, of frustration, of historical ineffectiveness, of sterility, even if they are sympathetic towards the victim’.Footnote ⁵ When one reads the letters of the exiled Spanish musicians Julián Bautista (1901–61) and Adolfo Salazar (1890–1958), however, it is difficult to fit the experience of exile that emerges from their correspondence within narratives of disconnection, ineffectiveness and lack of agenda. Both Bautista and Salazar kept in touch with friends and acquaintances in Spain, had some degree of knowledge of artistic life under Francoism, and contributed to the musical life of Spain. However, their contribution was not located in Madrid (which is typically thought of as the centre of musical life and innovation in Francoist Spain), but rather in the Spanish provinces.

Bautista and Salazar both initially rose to prominence in 1920s Madrid: Bautista was a member of the Grupo de los Ocho (Group of Eight), formed by composers who tried to introduce innovative languages and styles into Spanish music, focusing mainly on neoclassicism and French Impressionism,Footnote ⁶ whereas Salazar played a major role in promoting the Grupo de los Ocho through his writings and, more generally, in championing new music (Falla, Ravel and Stravinsky, rather than Schoenberg) in Spain. Bautista and Salazar, like other composers active in Spain, were politically involved with the government of the Spanish Second Republic. Between 1931 and 1936, Salazar was a member of the Junta Nacional de Música y de Teatros Líricos.Footnote ⁷ Bautista, by contrast, followed the Spanish Republican government to Valencia at the start of the Civil War in 1936 and the following year was made a member of the Consejo Central de Música (Central Music Council), which controlled concert life and music publishing in the Republican area during the Civil War (other members included Rodolfo Halffter, Salvador Bacarisse and Roberto Gerhard).Footnote ⁸ Both men went into exile before the Civil War ended: Bautista arrived in Buenos Aires in 1940 via France and Belgium,Footnote ⁹ whereas Salazar fled Spain in 1937, living temporarily in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the United States before finally settling in Mexico City in March 1939 as a member of the Casa de España at the invitation of President Lázaro Cárdenas.Footnote ¹⁰

Bautista and Salazar were able to seize the professional opportunities offered by their host countries. Bautista quickly acclimatized to the Buenos Aires musical scene, establishing himself as a much-in-demand film composer. He was also one of the Argentinian delegates at the annual festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Amsterdam in 1948, where his song cycle Catro poemas galegos (Four Galician Poems) was performed. Salazar continued to write prolifically in Mexico and was very active as a guest lecturer on musical topics. Neither Bautista nor Salazar set foot in Spain again after their exile.

There was something else Bautista and Salazar had in common: during their years in exile they corresponded with musicians who had remained in Spain after the Civil War, including members of the Grupo de los Ocho. In this article I will examine some of this correspondence, specifically Bautista's with the composer Fernando Remacha and the choral conductor Luis Morondo (both of whom were based in the region of Navarre);Footnote ¹¹ and Salazar's with the composer Ernesto Halffter (based in Madrid and Lisbon) and with the musician, poet and cultural activist Luis García-Abrines (based in Saragossa).Footnote ¹² I will focus on two main themes: first, the involvement of Bautista and Salazar in music-making in the Spanish provinces as reflected in these letters; and, secondly, their reflections on the Spanish musical scene, on the political situation under Franco and on exile and displacement. The evidence of this correspondence demonstrates that the involvement of Bautista and Salazar in music-making in the Spanish provinces while in exile, and the reflections this prompted, provide a more varied picture of the experience of Spanish Republican exiles and of exiled musicians generally. It also sheds light on the organization of musical life under Francoism, by paying particular attention to innovative musical and cultural projects developed in the provinces, as opposed to Madrid. Indeed, these letters show how Bautista's and Salazar's perception of their own condition as exiles was multifaceted, encompassing not only nostalgia and political concerns, but also a wish to acquire certain types of prestige in the different spheres in which they operated. They hoped to cultivate different types of bonds with their home country, while at the same time actively managing their own presence in Spain. Here I follow Lydia Goehr in believing that the exiles did not necessarily consider the old and the new (i.e. their lives before and after exile) as mutually exclusive, but rather as realities ‘interpenetrating or mediating one another’.Footnote ¹³ In the next section, I offer some context through which to interpret the presence of exiled musicians in Francoist Spain. I then move on to analyse Salazar's and Bautista's correspondence in detail, focusing on the themes of their involvement in music-making in the provinces and their reflections on Spanish politics, Spanish musical life and exile.

Exiled Republican composers during Francoism

There are many well-known examples of contact between the Republican exiles and Francoist Spain. For instance, there were the attempts of the so-called ‘liberal falangists’ to rescue the work of prominent intellectuals in exile through their periodical Escorial in the early 1940s; the well-publicized return to Spain of the physician Gregorio Marañón (1942), the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1948) and the novelist Ramón Pérez de Ayala (1954);Footnote ¹⁴ and the novelist Camilo José Cela's extensive correspondence with intellectuals in exile from 1956 onwards.Footnote ¹⁵ Current music scholarship, however, often operates under the notion that exiled composers were forgotten, neglected or even actively silenced under Francoism.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, some exiled musicians regained a presence in Spain well before the end of the dictatorship, as did exiles in other artistic disciplines. For example, the composer Óscar Esplá settled back in Spain as early as 1950,Footnote ¹⁷ and most other exiles had some of their music performed or some of their writings published in Francoist Spain.

It is certainly possible to argue that exiled composers had little presence in official musical life during the first two decades of the regime. By ‘official’ I refer here to the concerts, events and festivals organized by the regime's institutions, such as its various ministries, the Comisaría de Música, the Orquesta Nacional, Radio Nacional de España and Televisión Española, among others; I also include some non-state orchestras which occupied an active and prominent role in Spanish concert life, such as the Orquesta Filarmónica de Madrid and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid. A characteristic of official musical life is that most, if not all, of it took place in Madrid – which was to be expected, given that the traditional Spanish centralism was only exacerbated by the dictatorship. Bautista and Salazar themselves were excluded from official musical life in Spain until after their deaths: Salazar was revived in 1958, when Federico Sopeña, possibly the most influential writer on music at the time in Spain, explicitly presented his Historia de la música española contemporánea as the continuation of Salazar's La música contemporánea en España.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, after Salazar died in September the same year, a number of newspapers and prominent music and arts periodicals published his obituary.Footnote ¹⁹ For Bautista, a revival came in 1964, when his Obertura festiva was included in the first Festival de Música de América y España, a high-profile event organized by the Instituto de Cultura Hispánica.

However, marginalization from or late entry into official musical life did not mean that the exiles could not be present in or actively contribute to other spheres of musical life in Spain – in particular, music-making in the provinces. Examples include Eduardo Martínez Torner, who was well known and celebrated in his native Asturias during the 1960s,Footnote ²⁰ and Gerhard, whose works were played in Catalonia on at least 20 occasions between 1954 and 1975.Footnote ²¹ In both cases, their contribution to artistic life in Spain was initially made possible by old friends and acquaintances among the exiles (Ángel Muñiz Toca and Modesto González Cobas in the case of Martínez Torner; Joaquim Homs and others in the case of Gerhard), but it eventually ended up involving local and provincial institutions of the regime's administrative apparatus, such as town councils, diputaciones provinciales and institutes for local studies.

Therefore, it was by rejoining the networks of which they had been part before the Civil War that some of the exiles could establish and manage a presence in Spain. This was the case with Bautista and Salazar and the networks they had established during the 1920s and 1930s as part of the Grupo de los Ocho. Here it must be clarified that, although the name might suggest otherwise, this was by no means a group with common aims or similar styles, but rather a loose association of composers for whom Gustavo Pittaluga had coined the name Grupo de los Ocho as a reminiscence of Les Six on the occasion of their first joint concert at the Residencia de Estudiantes in November 1930.Footnote ²² Understandably, some of these loose ties seem to have been more or less completely cut off by the Civil War: on the basis of Salazar's La música orquestal en el siglo XX, published in 1956, it seems quite obvious that he knew very little about what Bautista and Bacarisse had composed in exile.Footnote ²³ This disconnection may simply have been caused by the physical distance and the difficulties of international communication during the Second World War, but it is likely that political and personal differences played a role as well. Indeed, whereas Salazar and others, such as Jesús Bal y Gay, left Spain without having been significantly involved with the Republican government during the war and were not therefore under direct threat of death or imprisonment, Bautista, Bacarisse and Rodolfo Halffter did indeed collaborate with the Republican government and, once the Francoist victory was imminent, did not have many options left other than to leave Spain. Some authors have alluded to tensions between Salazar and Bal y Gay on the one hand, and those who had collaborated with the Republican government, on the other.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that, under the loose umbrella of the Grupo, there were significant personal and artistic relationships which spanned the Civil War, such as the mentoring of Ernesto Halffter by Salazar and the friendship between Bautista, Remacha and Bacarisse, who met as early as the mid-1910s in Conrado del Campo's composition class at the Madrid Conservatoire.Footnote ²⁵

What significance did Bautista and Salazar attach to the networks they established with their colleagues living in the Spanish provinces, and why should such networks interest us? First, we must take into account that neither Bautista nor Salazar had been involved in music-making in the provinces to any significant extent before the Civil War. Their careers before exile, including their involvement with the Grupo de los Ocho and their promotion of new music, were instead intrinsically linked to the urban milieu of Madrid. It was chance rather than choice that initially enabled them to contribute to provincial musical life under Francoism – it was Remacha who contacted Bautista from Navarre and García-Abrines who contacted Salazar from Saragossa, rather than the other way around. In other words, although Salazar and Bautista might not initially have attached a particularly high value to music-making in the provinces, their attitudes changed and evolved in different ways over the course of their exile. Indeed, I would like to argue that what makes the focus on the provinces particularly interesting is the fact that two cultured, highly successful exiles, the focus on whom seems almost stereotypical of the elitist approach of which scholarship of the Spanish Republican exile has sometimes been accused,Footnote ²⁶ were actually involved in a sphere traditionally considered as lacking prestige, and that it was through that sphere that they maintained their status. The focus on Bautista's and Salazar's involvement with provincial music-making provides a more varied picture of the possibilities available to exiles in terms of contributing to artistic and intellectual life in Spain beyond official musical life in Madrid.

Secondly, we must acknowledge that Bautista and Salazar were consummate cultivators of networks, both within prestigious circles in their host countries and within the community of Spanish expatriates. Bautista received help from Falla as he tried to establish himself in the Argentinian music scene in the early 1940s, and he joined the teaching staff of the newly created Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico at the invitation of the exiled cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals in 1959. Similarly, Salazar's stay in Mexico cannot be understood without the magazine Nuestra música (1946–53), which he created with two other exiles, the composers Rodolfo Halffter and Bal y Gay. This, though, does not make Bautista and Salazar exceptional in any way: recent studies of exile have paid much attention to networks – as multidimensional relationships both within the community of exiles and with other individuals and institutions in the home or host country – in an attempt to illustrate both the nature of the exilic experience and the contribution of the exiles to a number of intellectual and artistic spheres that transcend national boundaries.Footnote ²⁷ This does not mean, however, that Bautista and Salazar attached the same value to all of these networks. On the contrary, they established priorities and preferences between these networks on the basis of different criteria: professional interest, financial gain, emotional attachment or the desire to establish and manage a presence in their home country. The same is true of the networks Bautista and Salazar established with musicians living in the Spanish provinces: to both men, these networks provided opportunities to resume contact with past acquaintances, obtain professional and financial gains and establish a presence in Spain; however, each of the two men assessed and made use of these possibilities in different ways. Indeed, as I will show in the course of this article, Salazar became progressively more aware of and enthusiastic about the role of the provinces for artistic life in Spain, whereas the opposite was true for Bautista. Their contrasting attitudes show that exiles did have the capacity to use these provincial networks to their advantage, not only in terms of contributing to Spanish musical life, but also in terms of establishing and managing their own presence in Spain.

The exiles’ involvement in provincial music-making

Salazar's correspondence with García-Abrines, which dates from 3 November 1950 to 1 July 1952, shows that, even from exile, Salazar was able and keen to undertake the mentorship role he had adopted in the 1920s with younger musicians such as Ernesto Halffter. García-Abrines, born in 1923, returned to Saragossa in 1948 after graduating in Romance languages from the University of Madrid. His interdisciplinary interests were fuelled by the active arts community of Saragossa: Alfonso Buñuel (brother of Luis Buñuel) introduced García-Abrines to surrealist painting, and it was possibly through the pianist Pilar Bayona that he learnt of Salazar and the exiled members of the Grupo de los Ocho. Bayona had been associated with the Grupo de los Ocho in the 1920s and 1930s, having given first performances of a number of their works.

Bayona also inspired García-Abrines's first significant project. In April 1948 he organized, through the Sociedad Filarmónica de Zaragoza, a concert dedicated to Falla, featuring Bayona playing the Fantasía bética as well as the Orquesta Sinfónica de Zaragoza.Footnote ²⁸ Although the organizers had expected a great success, the Saragossan audience was not particularly enthusiastic. In response, García-Abrines, together with his friend Manuel Derqui, created a subgroup within the Filarmónica with the aim of promoting chamber and contemporary music. The subgroup was named Sansueña after one of the old names for the city of Saragossa, which was also the setting for Falla's puppet-opera El retablo de maese Pedro. García-Abrines and Derqui launched a series of chamber- and contemporary-music concerts; the first programme note for the new series, which was reprinted in the journal Destino, explained:

Sansueña became a means through which exiled composers and their music could be reintegrated into Spanish musical life, though it functioned in the provinces rather than in Madrid. Sansueña organized two concerts in Saragossa dedicated to the music of the exiled composers Rodolfo Halffter, Rosa García Ascot and Salazar himself. Later, in March 1951, Sansueña hosted one of the first public events in which Esplá was involved since he had returned from exile in August 1950, a concert in which Bayona gave first performances of Esplá's Sonata del sur and Sonata española.Footnote ³⁰ In the meantime, García-Abrines had begun corresponding with Salazar. It is likely, as has been mentioned before, that García-Abrines's interest in the exiles had been nurtured by Bayona and Alfonso Buñuel, but his correspondence with Salazar started as a matter of chance rather than out of a deliberate interest in engaging in conversation with the exiles: García-Abrines found out Salazar's address only after his brother visited Salazar in Mexico.

It must be taken into account that Sansueña was not the first organization to programme Salazar's works in the Spanish provinces under Francoism,Footnote ³¹ though such occasions did not usually have much resonance beyond the local sphere. Their limited reach was not necessarily because the music of the exiles was being played, but rather because they took place in modest venues, involving performers and ensembles who were not typically part of official musical life. Sansueña was, however, one of the first organizations in Francoist Spain actively and systematically to promote contemporary Spanish music through concert series; the Círculo Manuel de Falla, an association of young Catalan composers who came together in 1947 both to promote their work and to stimulate a broader debate about contemporary music, is another example of the developing interest in contemporary music from the late 1940s onwards.

Salazar was highly encouraging of García-Abrines's efforts and promoted Sansueña among his colleagues in exile, including a mention in the influential magazine Nuestra música. In a letter to García-Abrines, he wrote:

García-Abrines was likewise keen to receive information from Salazar about exiled composers in Mexico.Footnote ³³ It must be taken into account, though, that García-Abrines, having been born in 1923, did not have direct experience of the activities of the exiles before the Civil War, and he could not possibly have read much about them in the Spanish press. By the early 1950s, the Spanish press was again reporting on the activities of the exiles,Footnote ³⁴ but such mentions were rare and usually short. Salazar also sent García-Abrines some issues of Nuestra música, to which García-Abrines reacted with admiration and astonishment: ‘My God! How is it even possible that we do not have musical periodicals in Spain, whereas in Mexico you are publishing one of such a high standard?’Footnote ³⁵ Conversely, Salazar also benefited from García-Abrines's knowledge of artistic life in Spain: it was García-Abrines who provided him with information about Esplá, who had been exiled in Belgium but returned to Spain in 1951, and Remacha. In particular, Salazar was interested in their works ‘written after the explosion of Paracutín’ (referring to the Spanish Civil War).Footnote ³⁶ Salazar was also keen to have his books Sinfonía y ballet (1929) and Música y músicos de hoy (1928) reprinted in Spain, for which he asked for García-Abrines's collaboration: ‘I suppose that the publishing industry in Madrid must not be very illustrious, but if any publisher would like to launch second editions […], I would be very happy to assist with this. I leave you in charge of this, if you do not have any objections.’Footnote ³⁷ Although these works were not reprinted under Francoism and, indeed, there is no further mention of them in the Salazar–García-Abrines correspondence, Salazar's letter shows how the exiles tried to make the networks they established with people living in Spain work to their advantage, including managing their presence in the country.Footnote ³⁸

The most influential aspect of Salazar's mentorship of García-Abrines, however, came towards the last years of their correspondence, after García-Abrines had become disenchanted with Sansueña.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, within the Filarmónica, Sansueña was largely a personal project of García-Abrines and Derqui, and did not have either financial or personal support from the board of trustees at the Filarmónica.Footnote ⁴⁰ This prompted García-Abrines to focus on his personal research projects, with which he received Salazar's help. First of all, throughout 1952 Salazar helped García-Abrines prepare a facsimile of Gaspar Sanz's pioneering seventeenth-century guitar method Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española,Footnote ⁴¹ which was subsequently published by the Institución Fernando el Católico.Footnote ⁴² Salazar, who had written about music in Cervantes and Spanish sixteenth-century music for vihuela (Spanish viola da mano),Footnote ⁴³ provided García-Abrines with photocopies of the original 1674 edition (held at the Hispanic Society in New York) and musicological advice.Footnote ⁴⁴ Secondly, the correspondence shows that Salazar played a major role in García-Abrines's decision to leave Spain in 1952, when he was disenchanted with Spanish artistic life and the lack of interest for modern arts among the population. He therefore began actively to try to leave Spain, applying for teaching positions in Spanish at British and German universities in an attempt to avoid ‘rotting in Saragossa’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Salazar encouraged him to apply for a scholarship for the Collège d'Espagne at the Cité Universitaire of Paris; Salazar himself had visited the Collège in 1949, as part of his trip to Paris and Rome to conduct research, and was confident that García-Abrines would find a suitable environment for his interests there. García-Abrines applied to and was awarded a scholarship in order to study French contemporary music. After two years in Paris, in 1954 he moved to the USA, where he taught Spanish at Yale for five years. After that, he spent a year in Spain conducting archival research, but when he returned to the USA in October 1959 to take up a Spanish professorship at South Central Community College (New Haven, CT), he was already determined to leave his home country permanently.Footnote ⁴⁶

Salazar's role in encouraging García-Abrines to settle abroad is a significant example of the so far mostly unexplored relationship between the Republican exiles and what Manuel Aznar Soler has called ‘segundo exilio’ (second exile), referring to Spaniards who left their country in the 1950s and 1960s, such as the writer Juan Goytisolo and the playwright Fernando Arrabal. The notion of ‘second exile’ is not unproblematic.Footnote ⁴⁷ ‘Exile’ typically evokes the notion of forced displacement – either because a government expels a citizen from its territory, or because exiles themselves fear for their lives or their freedom if they stay in or return to their home country. Real or perceived physical danger was certainly common among those who went into exile in 1939,Footnote ⁴⁸ but it was less of a concern for the members of the second exile. It is the political side of the second exile which tends to be emphasized,Footnote ⁴⁹ and indeed most of them abhorred the lack of democracy and the restrictions on freedom of expression under the regime. Many members of the ‘segundo exilio’ were active in the anti-Francoist struggle, but some of them, such as García-Abrines, left Spain, most of them in search of a more fruitful artistic and intellectual environment.

It can be argued, on the other hand, that, over time, many of those who had left Spain during the Civil War remained in exile by choice and not because death or imprisonment was a real threat should they go back to Spain. By the mid-1940s, the Franco regime had abandoned mass repression, and a few years later it was possible for the exiles to visit Spain without fearing for their lives or their freedom – as, indeed, some of them did. With some exceptions, staying in exile, therefore, was no longer the only option, but simply one of several choices informed by a number of factors – which certainly included rejection of the Franco regime, but also the desire to live in an artistically and intellectually rich environment in which one was respected. It makes sense, therefore, to think of the 1939 exiles and the members of the ‘segundo exilio’ as part of a larger diasporic community who partially shared some of their motivations.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is supported by the fact that mentoring relations were established across both groups, such as García-Abrines with Salazar, and the pianist and composer Antonio Ruiz-Pipó with Bacarisse in Paris during the 1950s.

Bautista's case is more complex, in that his contribution to musical life in the Spanish provinces was ultimately frustrated not necessarily for political reasons, but more for reasons of prestige and personal choice. Bautista's participation in provincial music-making was channelled through his friend the composer Remacha and the conductor Morondo. I have already mentioned that Remacha studied in Madrid under Del Campo in the mid- to late 1910s; there followed a five-year stint as Gian Francesco Malipiero's student in Rome (1923–8), after which he settled in Madrid as a viola player with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid, a composer with the Grupo de los Ocho and an arranger with Filmófono, a film production company founded by Luis Buñuel. After the Civil War, Remacha was unable to rejoin Filmófono and therefore settled back in his home town of Tudela, where he worked in the family ironmongery business and composed music in his spare time.Footnote ⁵¹

Remacha's decision to return to Tudela after the Civil War and abandon public involvement in music has been repeatedly labelled as an ‘inner exile’ which ended in 1957, when Remacha accepted the directorship of the newly founded Pablo Sarasate Conservatoire in Pamplona.Footnote ⁵² To my knowledge, however, there has been no in-depth discussion of how Remacha fits within Paul Ilie's concept of ‘inner exile’,Footnote ⁵³ or within the discussions around this concept in the field of Hispanic studies during the last two decades.Footnote ⁵⁴ If we accept that ‘inner exile’ means deliberately refraining from taking part in the cultural and artistic life of a regime of which one disapproves, it is doubtful that Remacha can be labelled as such: indeed, as early as 1947 he entered and won the Premio de Viana prize,Footnote ⁵⁵ awarded by the Pamplona-based Institución Príncipe de Viana, one of the institutions through which the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas promoted research on local and provincial interest topics. In 1951 he accepted a commission from the Institución to orchestrate a traditional Navarrese song, El baile de la era.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moreover, as I shall discuss below, he also actively tried to rejoin the national music scene during the 1950s by submitting his work to contests. Indeed, I feel that, rather than ‘inner exile’, a more accurate description of Remacha's musical career after 1939 is that his life circumstances forced him to develop his career in the provinces and not in Madrid, as he had done thus far – and this provides an interesting parallel with Salazar and Bautista, in that they engaged with musical life in the Spanish provinces only after the Civil War.

Morondo (1909–83), by contrast, was a native of Puente la Reina, in the province of Pamplona. He studied at the Bilbao Conservatoire and started his career as conductor of the Castro Urdiales Choral Society in Cantabria. After the Civil War, he went to live in Pamplona, where he took on a clerical job. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed assistant conductor at the Orfeón Pamplonés (Pamplona Choral Society) and founded the Agrupación Coral de Cámara de Pamplona (Pamplona Chamber Choir) in 1946, specializing in Renaissance and Baroque polyphony.Footnote ⁵⁷ At that time, Spain was abandoning the isolating politics typical of the first years of the dictatorship, thus allowing Spanish ensembles and musicians to travel abroad, and indeed the Coral de Cámara rapidly established a solid international reputation, winning prizes at the Llangollen Choral Festival in 1949 and the International Singing Competition in Lille in 1949. These were followed by a number of successful tours in Latin America and Europe, as well as recordings, mainly of early Spanish repertoire.

Alongside Renaissance and Baroque repertoire, Morondo was keen to promote contemporary Spanish choral music. In order to do this he sought Remacha's expertise and knowledge of the Spanish choral repertoire.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although Morondo had no particular interest in bringing the music of the exiles back to Spain, he does not seem to have resisted Remacha's suggestions of including music by the exiles in the Coral's concerts. The Coral sang works by Bacarisse and Pittaluga in a Latin American tour in 1951, and in January 1952, at the suggestion of Remacha, Morondo commissioned a work from Bautista for performance in the upcoming International Music Weeks in Paris, to which Remacha also intended to contribute a work.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bautista, however, took four years to fulfil Morondo's request. The correspondence between Bautista and Remacha in the intervening years helps shed some light on Bautista's somehow reluctant attitude fully to become involved in this musical network, even if this invitation could have become his way back into the Spanish musical scene.

In March 1953, Remacha wrote to Bautista: ‘I hope you have already had the opportunity to start composing the work you promised the Coral. If you finish it soon, perhaps they will be able to include it in the International Music Weeks of Royaumont (Paris), where the Coral will sing in June.’Footnote ⁶⁰ However, it was not until 1956 that Bautista sent Remacha a copy of his Romance del rey Rodrigo (a choral work based on the Spanish medieval legend of King Rodrigo, the last monarch of the Hispanic Visigoth kingdom). Bautista's lack of interest is evident from the fact that not only did it take him four years to fulfil Morondo's request, but also he did not send an unperformed work: the Romance had already been premièred by the Agrupación Madrigalista of the Asociación de Conciertos de Cámara of Buenos Aires in August 1956, and Bautista had received a commission fee for it.Footnote ⁶¹ In his letters, Remacha echoed Bautista's ambivalence, saying that he had forwarded the music to Morondo, but without telling him that the work had already been premièred because ‘he [Morondo] is so stupid that perhaps [the fact that the work had already been performed] will be enough to make him lose interest’.Footnote ⁶² Remacha also questioned Morondo's musical talents and mocked his obsession with international recognition, calling him a ‘divo with a peasant mindset’ and complaining that he was very slow in rehearsing music.Footnote ⁶³ Morondo ultimately rejected the work for his choir, but Bautista did not seem affected by this in any serious way, and he wrote to Remacha: ‘About that which concerns Morondo: never mind! It seems he does not like the work. I am sorry, especially because a Spanish choir should sing works of this nature, not out of patriotism, but because it should be a pleasure to them.’Footnote ⁶⁴

In a later letter, from June 1957, Bautista revealed some of the reasons for his reluctance to participate fully in the musical network opened up to him by Morondo and his choral ensemble. At that time, Remacha was considering entering the Óscar Esplá composition contest – one of the most prestigious in Spain at the time – and announced his intentions to Bautista, asking him whether he planned to enter the contest as well.Footnote ⁶⁵ Bautista answered that he was not interested in taking part in the Esplá contest because he had decided to enter another competition in Caracas whose prizes were financially more substantial.

Remacha's music had very limited exposure outside his native Navarre during the 1940s and early to mid-1950s; indeed, in describing to Bautista the efforts he put into his music and the little financial or professional satisfaction he got from it, he called music ‘an expensive luxury’.Footnote ⁶⁶ His professional contacts from the 1920s and 1930s were in exile or dead and he was, therefore, highly dependent on the possibilities offered by Morondo and his choral ensemble in order to rejoin musical networks – as seemed to be his wish. This explains why, in spite of his antipathy for Morondo, Remacha continued collaborating with him and why he appointed Morondo to a teaching position at the Pamplona Conservatoire when he was appointed director in 1957. Remacha wrote about this appointment in similarly dismissive terms, complaining that Morondo had still not performed Bautista's Romance:

Bautista, on the other hand, had managed to join prestigious music networks both national and international while in exile in Argentina. The possibility of having his work performed, even at high-profile events, by Morondo's choir was, therefore, not such a high priority as it was for Remacha. Similarly, whereas for Remacha winning the Esplá contest would have significantly improved his chances of rejoining Spanish musical life, Bautista did not seem to have any incentive, either financial or in terms of prestige or patriotic commitment, to enter the competition. When Remacha announced his intentions of entering the Esplá contest, Bautista had recently taken part in the relatively prestigious Caracas Music Festival (1957), and he hoped that the Sinfonía breve, which had been performed there, would help him consolidate his ‘little reputation’. Indeed, probably as a consequence of Bautista's successes in Latin America, at no point in his letters to Remacha did he seem particularly keen to have his works performed again in Spain for reasons of nostalgia or out of a desire to be present in his home country again after exile. He clearly approached the opportunities Morondo offered from a more pragmatic point of view, showing that those exiles who had attained prestige in their host countries could and did consciously manage their presence in Francoist Spain, acting not necessarily out of nostalgia or political motivation, but out of their wish for prestige or money.Footnote ⁶⁸

Reflections on the home country, politics and exile

Both Salazar and Bautista used their correspondence with friends in Spain to keep themselves informed and express their opinions about musical life in their home country. Letters were also an outlet in which both exiles expressed their reflections on their own displacement and are thus a crucial source for the study of exiled Republican composers. Scholars of Spanish music have made attempts at reading musical works as expressions of composers’ perceptions of exile,Footnote ⁶⁹ but not so much attention has been paid to written reflections, which tend to be confined to private correspondence.Footnote ⁷⁰

In 1956, Remacha submitted a guitar concerto to the Esplá composition contest. This was his first major attempt to return to the Spanish national music scene after 1939. He did not win, and he expressed his disappointment in his next letter to Bautista.Footnote ⁷¹ He reported that Esplá, who was a member of the jury, had liked his concerto, but that the other two judges had decided to award the prize to Fantasía homenaje a Walt Disney, a work for piano and orchestra by Jesús Guridi, which Remacha described as ‘a vulgar thing with some modernist touches that are most inadequate’.Footnote ⁷² He also wrote about Joaquín Rodrigo's disappointment at not having obtained any prize, either, with the harp concerto he had submitted: ‘He was enraged and I believe he wrote letters to everybody and wanted to hide the fact that he had taken part in the competition.’Footnote ⁷³ Remacha regarded this episode as highly representative of the musical scene under Francoism and, more generally, of Francoist politics: ‘I tell you all of this to show you that the musical scene here is as corrupt as is everything else.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Remacha's disappointment prompted Bautista to express his opinion of musical life under Francoism in his next letter.Footnote ⁷⁵ He was vocal in his criticism of Guridi (‘We all know his talent can go only so far’)Footnote ⁷⁶ and, especially, Rodrigo, to whom, alluding to Rodrigo's total visual impairment, he referred as ‘el ciego’ (‘the blind one’): ‘This man thinks of himself as a supreme genius, and I have the impression that he must be very skilled indeed – at intriguing.’Footnote ⁷⁷ In an attempt to provide an example of Rodrigo's skill for intrigue he referred, in rather unclear terms, to an episode involving the conductor Ataúlfo Argenta and Bacarisse's Tres movimientos concertantes. Bautista stated that Argenta wanted to conduct Bacarisse's work in Madrid, but had been forced to remove the work from the programme, ‘and all because of the pressures and intrigues of the protectors of that little blind man, who, by the way, has always known how to benefit from his blindness, don't you think?’Footnote ⁷⁸

Bautista's criticism of Rodrigo is of special significance because, despite being close in age to most of the members of the Grupo de los Ocho, Rodrigo had risen to prominence only under Francoism, largely thanks to having become Sopeña's protégé after the first performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is therefore likely that Bautista was frustrated at seeing Rodrigo occupy the place that Bautista and his fellow exiles would have occupied had they remained in Spain. In his letter he seems keen to dispel the impression that he was jealous of Rodrigo, and it is telling that in order to do so he referred to his experience of exile. Acknowledging that his tirade against Rodrigo could be read as an example of the resentment fostered by some exiles towards their native country, Bautista wrote:

I would like to turn my attention to the word Bautista uses to describe himself, ‘desplazado’, which I have translated here as ‘displaced’, denoting a person who has moved from one place to another. Unlike ‘exiliado’ (exile), ‘refugiado’ (refugee) or ‘desterrado’ (banned), ‘desplazado’ is a generic word and does not necessarily indicate politically or economically motivated displacement. However, ‘desplazado’ in Spanish can also have the meaning of being passed over, usually in favour of something or someone else – just like Bautista and other composers with promising careers in the 1930s had been ‘passed over’ after 1939 in favour of someone like Rodrigo. In Bautista's letter, the word ‘desplazado’ seems to indicate not only a move from one geographical place to another, but also a change in status. In the rest of the letter, however, Bautista presented himself as a man who may have been displaced in purely geographical terms, but who had certainly not been passed over in his new milieu. He mentioned that in Buenos Aires there was an extremely active art-music scene, with 126 symphonic concerts in the previous 12 months alone; this, according to Bautista, ensured that there was room for everybody and made personal rivalries very unusual. When he won first prize at the Ricordi 150th anniversary competition with his Sinfonía ricordiana in 1959, he described his success to Remacha in similar terms, calling the Ricordi prize the touchstone of the sympathy with which he was regarded in Argentina. He wrote that he had recently been appointed a professor at the Conservatorio Nacional ‘even though I do not have an Argentinian passport, which did not cause any protests at all; on the contrary, it was widely approved of by everybody’.Footnote ⁸¹ Interestingly, Bautista's personal experience of exile fits well within the philosopher José Gaos's widespread notion of ‘transterrado’, with which he referred to the exiles who had found opportunities to continue developing their careers in their host country.Footnote ⁸²

Bautista thus framed his success as an exile in purely personal terms. As a member of the Consejo Central de la Música during the Civil War and a supporter of a number of anti-Franco petitions during his first decade in Argentina,Footnote ⁸³ Bautista had certainly been politically active. Political concerns, though, were absent from his self-reflections on exile. When Bautista wrote these letters in 1957 and 1959, of course, the Republican project had all but failed, and the exiles’ hopes of seeing the Allies replace Franco with a democratic regime were long gone.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is certainly imaginable that Bautista might have abandoned his political activities as a result of this, to the point that political considerations were not even mentioned in his writings from the late 1950s.

Paradoxically, it was Remacha who expressed political opinions more vocally – even though, in theory, he was more at risk of being punished in Spain for speaking out against Franco. Not much is known about Remacha's political ideology, but he was certainly not as politically active during the Republic and the Civil War as were his friends Bautista, Rodolfo Halffter and Bacarisse. He joined the Republican Army in the very last days of the war, when Franco's victory was already imminent, and soon had to cross the border into France; he decided to return to Spain upon seeing the deplorable conditions of the refugee camps in France, trusting that because he had not been politically active he would not be punished or investigated in Spain – as indeed he was not.Footnote ⁸⁵ Remacha's criticisms of the Franco regime concerned education (he was concerned that the expensive education he was financing for his son would be useless),Footnote ⁸⁶ misinformation (‘were it not for the radio, we would be entirely dependent on what the regime wanted to tell us’)Footnote ⁸⁷ and lack of freedom (he applied for a travel bursary from the Fundación Juan March under the pretext of wanting to work on his music in Paris, but he confessed to Bautista that ‘the only reason I applied was because I wanted to get out of that prison’).Footnote ⁸⁸ Whereas Bautista seems to have pushed his political concerns into the background after having found a welcoming milieu in Argentina, for Remacha the restrictions of the Franco regime continued to be very real.

Salazar's reflections on exile date from the early to mid-1940s, and this might partly explain the differences in tone from Bautista's later account. Salazar's was a very bitter experience, in which the personal and the political intermingled. His first reflections date from March 1940 and can be described mostly as an emotional response to his mother's recent death, which, however, forced him to rethink his relationship to his fatherland as well:

The event which decisively dissociated Salazar from Spain, therefore, seemed to be of a deeply personal nature, but has political ramifications as well. In the absence of a political project in Spain with which he could identify, as had been the case during the Second Republic, his mother was one of his few links to his fatherland (‘patria’), if not the only one. The fact that, newly arrived in Mexico as a member of an institution of such intellectual importance as the Casa de España, he did not have ‘the desire to undertake anything’ speaks of how important his Spanish (and particularly, Madrilenian) milieu were to him and indicates that for Salazar, as for other exiles, home was not simply a place, but rather ‘a continually transforming set of bonds organized by activities, conversations, and relationships that trace memories of the past, establish patterns of present significance, and suggest desires for the future’,Footnote ⁹⁰ to borrow Goehr's words. Indeed, Salazar's love of engaging polemically with other music critics, his role as mentor towards the Grupo de los Ocho and his involvement in the Junta Nacional de Música are testimony to what ‘patria’ meant to him. This was a set of interconnected, three-dimensional networks in which he played a very important and influential part.

The correspondence with Ernesto Halffter in the next few years shows how Salazar tortuously assimilated his own exile during the early to mid-1940s. Although Salazar did in the end find a welcoming milieu in Mexico, his links with Spain were deteriorating. He had a very close personal relationship with Halffter before the Civil War, but the relationship between the two men during the 1940s was tense at times. In the months immediately following the Civil War, Halffter and his wife, Alicia, who then lived between Madrid and Lisbon, tried to help Salazar's mother leave Spain and join her son in Mexico; their plan, however, failed in October 1939 after the Spanish police rejected her application to leave Spain. In a highly critical letter to his friend, Halffter accused Salazar and his mother of having aroused the suspicions of the Spanish police by implying in their correspondence that Salazar's mother would not be just visiting Mexico, but rather intended to settle there with her son. Halffter also feared that the episode could have negative consequences for him and his wife.Footnote ⁹¹

During the next few years, correspondence between Salazar and Halffter was sparse, and Salazar often complained about his friend's apathy. It seems, however, that Salazar still regarded Halffter pretty much as his confidant, given that it was only in his letters to Halffter that he reflected about his experience of exile. In contrast with the 1940 letter after his mother's death, a letter from 1943 is signed ‘Adolfo, who is already looking forward to eating cocido [a typical Madrilenian dish] and sleeping in his bed’.Footnote ⁹² Two years later, a letter from Halffter asking Salazar whether he was planning to return to Spain prompted a mixed answer. Salazar acknowledged that returning was not a feasible option yet,Footnote ⁹³ and that he was reluctant to return – not for political, but rather for personal reasons. On one hand, like Bautista, he was relatively content with the professional opportunities offered by his host country (with some qualifications: ‘I hardly receive what I need to get by; however, I must not complain’).Footnote ⁹⁴ But he also cited negative reasons, which, as with Bautista, seems to suggest a desire to manage his position and prestige in Spanish intellectual life. He was worried about having aged and not being able to adapt to change again.Footnote ⁹⁵ He was also sceptical about the reality which awaited him in Spain, although he was ambiguous about what he actually meant: ‘What could interest me the most does not exist any more.’Footnote ⁹⁶ Was he referring to particular political circumstances, to personal relationships, or both? Although Salazar's political engagement dates from the Second Republic, he had already thrived as a critic in the 1920s – under another dictatorship, that of Primo de Rivera, thus suggesting that the nature of the Franco regime would not be too much of an obstacle against Salazar resuming his career, at least partially. However, the networks of which he had been part before the Civil War, the ‘patria’ I referred to before, did not exist any more. If we read this together with the mention of his old age, it makes more sense to assume that he was not confident about his ability to start a third time from scratch in Francoist Spain or that he could establish himself in a position comparable to the one he had in the Second Republic or in exile in Mexico.

Seven years later, Salazar was still sceptical about the quality of musical life awaiting him were he to return to Madrid. In his letters to García-Abrines from the 1950s, he expressed his hope that Sansueña could have some positive results for Spain, ‘in these times of commercialism, confusion and bluff, which are the patron saints of the New World’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Significantly, he thought that it was a good sign that Sansueña had not been founded in the capital, but rather in the provinces, which he considered to be almost the only hope in a culturally stagnant Spain: ‘Many years ago, in the first article I wrote about Federico [García Lorca], which was also the first article written about him, I think I wrote: “The provinces redeem us.” I believe the same can be said nowadays.’Footnote ⁹⁸

Conclusion

Salazar's hopes that the provinces could redeem Spain were not, as I have explained in the course of this article, shared by Bautista, who ultimately backed off from actively contributing to musical life in Navarre. This is one of several differences we find in the correspondence of two exiles who otherwise had a great deal in common. For example, whereas Bautista seemed firmly convinced that exile had brought him many opportunities, Salazar acknowledged that, while he, too, had had valuable opportunities in Mexico, he was more aware of the disconnection and trauma of exile. It is therefore understandable that he was keener than Bautista to use his friendship with García-Abrines to establish and maintain a presence in Spanish cultural life. But it could be argued that Bautista also used provincial networks for the same purpose and that his decision was simply not to establish his presence in Spanish musical life at that particular time. Neither of these examples must be generalized as applicable to all composers who lived in exile under Francoism. In my view, the true potential of these case studies is in opening the door to a more multifaceted understanding of exile and its impact on music, both in Spain and in other countries. This is especially true with regard to the relationship of exiles with their home country and their agency in initiating, establishing and managing this relationship, thus challenging the notion that the narrative of their time in exile is one of sterility and disconnection.

Similarly, the fact that the contributions to Spanish musical life of these two exiles and others took place in the provincial realm should help us rethink cultural life under Francoism, particularly in terms of centre/periphery and official/non-official dynamics. If we look solely at official musical life, or musical life in Madrid, under Francoism, we might be led to believe that it was dominated by the conservative nationalist style for which Rodrigo coined the term neocasticismo, by the conservative Comisaría de Música and by equally conservative audiences until the mid- to late 1950s, and that the avant-garde then erupted owing to the liberalization of the regime, which also made it possible to give major performances of the exiles’ works (indeed, the first performance of an orchestral work by an exile in a major venue in Madrid did not take place until April 1959).Footnote ⁹⁹ But Morondo's and García-Abrines's initiatives show that, at least in the provinces, some people were attempting not necessarily to bring the music of exiles back to Spain, but to familiarize audiences with contemporary Spanish music other than neocasticismo and even actively to create a contemporary Spanish repertoire. It was in these initiatives, and not in Madrid, that exiles could find a port of re-entry into Spanish musical life.

There remains the question of the status of these initiatives and of the exiles’ contributions within Spanish musical life. Indeed, while they developed largely outside official musical culture (if we take this to refer to the Comisaría de Música, the Instituto Español de Musicología and so forth), they seem to have been tolerated or even supported by institutions and official media at the provincial level: I have already mentioned García-Abrines's involvement with the Institución Fernando el Católico, and the Sansueña concerts were usually prominently and favourably reviewed in the Saragossan Falangist newspaper Amanecer. Narratives of exilic disconnection and ineffectiveness, therefore, also have to be revised to take into account the wide range of institutions that operated under the Franco regime and the wide range of individuals who were able to take advantage of different opportunities for exiles to become involved that presented themselves at different moments in time.