‘Staple of the Contemporary Music Scene’: Roberto Gerhard in Geopolitical Perspective

This chapter explores how the development of Gerhard’s career and conceptualization of the social role of music in mid-century post-Second World War Britain was shaped by Cold War geopolitical discourses that made culture the central ground of political struggle. Gerhard took part in explicitly ideological cultural debates at key historical intersections of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, while in Berlin in Weimar Germany as a student of Schoenberg, and during the Spanish Second Republic (1931–9) his work as an intellectual and musician embraced the political role of culture and art in the fight against fascism and for the advance of the popular classes. In the post-war period, this important political role was re-signified to accommodate the geopolitics of the Cold War, which had shifted the definition of democratic values vis à vis their enemies, from fascism to communism. Cultural producers like Gerhard, whose trajectories dated back to the 1920s and came from an open commitment to leftist antifascist politics, had to navigate, from their own localities, this transcendental shift. It is evidence of this ‘navigation’ in Gerhard’s exile production in England that this chapter explores.