ABSTRACT
[On December 22, 1929, a concert organized by the Associacio de Musica da Camera and devoted to the music of Gerhard, took place at the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona. This was a daring venture, an intrusion into the territory of the Orfeó Català, the right-wing conservative, bourgeois choral organization, modelled on Vincent d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum in Paris, which had been co-founded in 1891 by Lluis Millet and Amadeu Vives (later to achieve recognition as a composer of zarzuelas). A review of the concert by the 63-year-old Millet – by then an esteemed figure in Catalan culture – led the generally hostile press criticism. Published in the Revista Musical Catalana, the official organ of the Orfeó Català, it focused specifically on Gerhard’s Wind Quintet and Concertino for Strings. These works in particular seemed to Millet to undermine the traditional values embodied in both his cherished organization and the Palau itself, which had been designed to Millet’s specification by Domenech í Montaner, and featured an extravagant proscenium sculpture symbolizing the twin aspects of the Orfeó ideology – Catalan folk music and “universal” music as represented by Beethoven and Wagner.
