ABSTRACT
At first sight, Rodolfo Halffter’s trajectory in exile may seem an unusual one. A communist, he was among the musicians most actively committed to the Republican cause during the Civil War and the first years in exile in Mexico, and at the same time he quickly managed to build a reputation as a composer and teacher there. Halffter went back to his home country for the first time after the war to take part in a concert of his and his relatives’ works in 1963, and from then onwards he visited Spain virtually every year and participated in some of the most prestigious festivals and summer schools organized and sponsored by the Francoist government. About a dozen major works by Halffter were performed in 1960s and 1970s Spain, and they typically met with critical success; the younger generation of Spanish composers – including his nephew, Cristóbal Halffter – saw in him a valuable link between the young composers living before the Civil War and themselves, all apparently driven by the same wish to renovate and transform Spanish music. These composers, the critics who supported them and the members of the public institutions in which they found a productive outlet for their music regarded Halffter not simply as a good composer whose music deserved to be performed but also as someone who needed, imperatively, to be reintegrated into Spanish musical life so that Spanish music could catch up and fill the gaps left by the Civil War and the early years of the Franco regime. Such urgency is obvious from the reviews and programmes of some of the events Halffter took part in. For example, when Halffter’s Diferencias para orquesta was first performed in Spain on the occasion of the third Festival de Música de América y España in 1970, Tomás Marco wrote: ‘it fills a historical gap that has been quite harmful for Spanish music.’1
