Roberto Gerhard was born at Valls, Catalonia, Spain, on 25 September 1896. From childhood he showed a great interest in music and at the age of seventeen gave up business studies in Lausanne to enter the Royal Academy in Munich. The war of 1914 compelled him to return to his own country, where he completed his piano studies with Granados in 1915 and 1916 and his composition studies from 1915 to 1920 with Felip Pedrell, who was an important musicologist and the teacher of Albéniz and Falla.
In 1930 Gerhard married Leopoldina (Poldi) Fleichtegger, from Vienna, and settled in Barcelona. Over the following eight years, Gerhard composed the cantata L’alta naixemça de Rei En Jaume on a text by the poet J. Carner, the music for two ballets, Ariel and Soirées de Barcelona and Albada interludi I dansa, as well as various songs. He was a member of the Consell de Música. He also undertook various musicological projects for the Biblioteca de Catalunya, collaborated in various editions and translated German writings of musical interest. He arranged for Schoenberg to spend eight months in Barcelona, during which he wrote the greater part of the second act of his opera Moses und Aron.
Gerhards and his family moved to England in 1939 because of the civil war in Spain and settled near Cambridge. During the first ten years of his stay in England Gerhard wrote the greater part of his music of national Inspiration to obtain commissions from the BBC, which brought him immediately great prestige, similar to that of Falla. His principal works during this period were Sinfonía homenaje a Pedrell (1941), music for the ballets Alegrías (1942), Pandora, Don Quixote (1947) and the Violin Concerto (1942-45), with the opera The Duenna (1942-47), a work that only had a concert performance during his lifetime, to have a highly successful full staging in 1992, 22 years after the composer’s death.
