Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the Composer Julián Bautista (1901–61)

TLDR: In this paper, Bautista's presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Musica de America (FEMIA) was explored.

Abstract: Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julia´n Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in Spain, an interest which continued after the composer’s death in 1961. By exploring Bautista’s presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Musica de America y Espana, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the regime, and the cultural values and historical narratives that underpinned them.

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Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk
Moreda Rodriguez, Eva (2011) Francoism and the Republican exiles: the
case of the composer Julián Bautista (1901–61). Twentieth-Century
Music, 8 (2). pp. 153-173. ISSN 1478-5722
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/69598/
Deposited on: 1 October 2012

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FrancoismandtheRepublicanExiles:theCaseofthe
ComposerJuliánBautista(1901–61)
EVAMOREDARODRíGUEZ
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DOI:10.1017/S1478572212000060,Publishedonline:31July2012
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twentieth-century music 8/2, 153–173 8 Cambridge University Press, 2012
doi:10.1017/S1478572212000060
Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the
Composer Julia
´
n Bautista (1901–61)
EVA MOREDA-RODRI
´
GUEZ
Abstract
Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same
time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers
rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer
Julia
´
n Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in
his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in
Spain, an interest which continued after the composer’s death in 1961. By exploring Bautista’s presence in the
Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Mu
´
sica de Ame
´
rica
y Espan
˜
a, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward
liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the re
´
gime, and the cultural values and
historical narratives that underpinned them.
Julia
´
n Bautista (1901–61) was one of the many Spanish composers and performers who fled
their home country after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9); other well-
known names include the cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals, the composers Roberto Gerhard and
Rodolfo Halffter, and the critic Adolfo Salazar. Like many other prominent Republican
exiles, such as the poet Rafael Alberti, the painter and writer Luı
´
s Seoane, the playwright
Alejandro Casona, and the composer Jaume Pahissa, Bautista settled in Buenos Aires.
Although he never returned to Spain, the Franco re
´
gime made various attempts from 1957
onwards to secure his cooperation and reassimilate his work into the musical life and
history of his home country. These attempts, which continued after the composer’s death,
and the possible reasons behind them are the central focus of this article. While not reflect-
ing the experience of all exiled Spanish musicians, Bautista’s case was not an isolated one.
Indeed, during the 1950s the re
´
gime softened its attitude considerably towards the Republican
exiles, giving a number of them honorary positions or inviting them to contribute towards
its cultural programme. These episodes have been little explored in scholarship to date, even
though they provide a valuable additional dimension to our understanding of the exiles’
relationship with their home country. Taking Bautista as an example, this article seeks to
|
153
I would like to thank the Music and Letters Trust, the Lucille Graham Trust, and the Royal Academy of Music,
whose generous financial support enabled the completion of this research project. I am also grateful to two anony-
mous readers for this journal who provided useful comments on an earlier version of the article.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Sep 2012 IP address: 137.108.145.45
make an initial contribution towards the study of this wider phenomenon – the Franco
re
´
gime’s rehabilitation of exiled composers and their music.
Given that Bautista is little known in the anglophone world, the first section of the article
will present a brief overview of his life and career, followed by a discussion of the musical
and cultural policy of Franco’s re
´
gime during its first two decades (1939–59), and in partic-
ular its attitudes towards political exiles. I then turn my attention to Spanish exile studies,
discussing why they have paid little attention either to musicians (as opposed to writers) or
to the subsequent rehabilitation of exiles in general. I also explain how musicology has
treated the exile of Spanish musicians, and how this article seeks to move the debate
forward. This historical and theoretical context frames my discussion of the re
´
gime’s
attempts to gain Bautista’s cooperation; in this discussion I make use of several hitherto
unexamined documents (including letters, manuscripts, and press cuttings) from the Julia
´
n
Bautista Archive at the Spanish National Library and the McCann Collection at the Royal
Academy of Music.
1
Julia
´
n Bautista: an overview
Born in Madrid in 1901, Bautista studied the piano and composition at the Madrid Con-
servatory, where he met Fernando Remacha and Salvador Bacarisse.
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 impres-
sionism, 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-Trı
´
o,
1924). Between 1928 and 1932 Bautista focused on film music, before returning to neo-
classicism in 1932 with Obertura grotesca and Suite all’antica.
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
1 The McCann Collection, amassed by the music agent Norman McCann (1920–99), contains correspondence of
Argentine composers, including Juan Jose
´
Castro and Alberto Ginastera.
2 See De Persia, Julia
´
n Bautista (1901–1961). De Persia’s book is an inventory of the Julia
´
n Bautista Archive at the
Spanish National Library, with a biographical introduction. A full-length biography of Julia
´
n Bautista is yet to be
written.
3 Other works from Bautista’s early years include his two string quartets (1923 and 1926, both awarded the National
Prize for Composition) and Primera sonata concertata a quatro (1933–4). These works were lost during the Spanish
Civil War, in which Bautista’s house in Madrid was bombarded.
154
|
Moreda-Rodrı
´
guez Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the Composer Julia
´
n Bautista

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Palacio as intermediary.
4
In 1937 Bautista became a member of the Consejo Central de la
Mu
´
sica (Central Music Council), which regulated musical activities (including music edu-
cation) 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 Jose
´
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 Espan
˜
a (Nights in the Gardens of
Spain) with some songs by Bautista at a concert of the Asociacio
´
n Wagneriana de Buenos
Aires, a generous gesture for which Bautista wrote Falla a grateful letter.
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 Cinematogra
´
ficas (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.
6
It
was also at about this time that Bautista turned to Spanish myth and history as an inspira-
tion 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 Mu
´
sica Latinoamericana held in Caracas in 1957 testifies
to his thorough integration into the musical life of his host country. Roberto Garcı
´
a
Morillo, one of the other delegates, wrote on the occasion of the festival that ‘although of
Spanish origin [. . .], maestro Julia
´
n 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’.
7
In support of his claim he argued that Bautista had
4 The composer Carlos Palacio (1911–97) was a member of the PCE (Spanish Communist Party) who during the Civil
War collaborated with the Spanish government through the Milicias de la Cultura. He composed several hymns for
the Republican forces (including the hymn of the International Brigades) and also persuaded fellow composers and
musicians to contribute their own compositions to the cause.
5 Bautista, autograph letter to Manuel de Falla, 21 May 1943.
6 For example, in 1943 his Suite de danzas del ballet Juerga was given its first performance at the Teatro Colo
´
nof
Buenos Aires conducted by Juan Jose
´
Castro, and in 1952 his Obertura para una opera grotesca was first performed
by the Orquesta Sinfo
´
nica de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires under Manuel Rosenthal.
7 Garcı
´
a Morillo, ‘Coloquio con Julia
´
n Bautista’, La Nacio
´
n. In speaking of ‘the Argentine musical movement’, Garcı
´
a
Morillo seems not to be referring to any particular stylistic tendency but simply to art music composed in Argentina.
Moreda-Rodrı
´
guez Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the Composer Julia
´
n Bautista
|
155

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism ; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julián Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. These attempts, which continued after the composer ’ s death, and the possible reasons behind them are the central focus of this article. Taking Bautista as an example, this article seeks to | 153 I would like to thank the Music and Letters Trust, the Lucille Graham Trust, and the Royal Academy of Music, whose generous financial support enabled the completion of this research project. I am also grateful to two anonymous readers for this journal who provided useful comments on an earlier version of the article. 

Q2. Why has it been less accessible to the academic community?

This is partly because of the influence of ethnomusicology, which ‘has increasingly reminded21 This research has tended to be disseminated through hispanophone journals, thus making it less accessible to theinternational academic community and reducing considerably its potential to contribute to theoretical, methodological, and historical debates about the phenomenon of exile. 

Q3. What was the main reason for Julián Bautista to abandon the more innovative styles typical?

Downloaded: 13 Sep 2012 IP address: 137.108.145.45composers to abandon the more innovative styles typical of the 1920s and 30s in favour of neocasticismo (the tendency represented mainly by Joaquı́n Rodrigo)14 or, more generally, traditionalist nationalism. 

Q4. What was the influence of Falla on the ballet score Juerga?

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-Trı́o, 1924). 

Q5. What was the common use of oblivion in the musical press?

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. 

Q6. Who was one of the few scholars of Spanish music to use exile as a central category?

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.33 Remacha moved from Madrid to his home town of Tudela in Northern Spain after the end of the war. 

Q7. Who wrote the Romance del Mio Cid?

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. 

Q8. Who did he include in his Historia de la msica contempor?

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,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’.