Roberto Gerhard wrote his Wind Quintet (for flute doubling piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) in 1928, and conducted the first performance in Barcelona in 1930. At the time of writing it, Gerhard had reached the end of his five years of study with Arnold Schoenberg, whose own gigantic Wind Quintet had appeared just four years previously. Gerhard's Quintet is a short, concentrated work. It is also—at least as far as considerations of its origins and future implications are concerned—rather a complex one. To put it in a wide historical perspective, it stands among the foremost of the first generation of post-Viennese-school serial works. Looking closer, one can see revealed in it—aside from those craftsmanly skills, the mastering of which was the primary task of any Schoenberg pupil—a young composer, alive to many of the possibilities now open to him, possibilities beyond just those pertaining to his teacher's more revolutionary ideas, and at the same time perhaps uncertain which general direction to take.

Roberto Gerhard's widow tells of how at some time in the early 1930's, when the Gerhards were still living in Barcelona, their friend Josep Carner—perhaps the foremost poet of the Catalan language in the 20th century and dubbed by his contemporaries ‘the prince of poets’—complained to the composer that Gerhard had not yet honoured him by setting any of his verses to music. Gerhard readily accepted this invitation, couched as it was in the form of a mild reproach! It was Carner himself who suggested the text to be used, a specially re-worked version of a poem which had first appeared in a sort of pastiche medieval novel entitled La malvestat d'Oriana, written by Carner in 1910. The re-drafted poem and the new Gerhard cantata received the title L'alta naixença del rei En Jaume (The Noble Birth of the Sovereign Lord King James).

No-one familiar with the Gerhard of the Catalan Folksongs, Don Quixote, or The Duenna should have any difficulty in guessing the authorship of the Cantata. Admittedly, its stylization of Catalan popular idioms owes a little to the declamatory writing of Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show; but it owes very much more to the already typically Gerhardian tonal and free-tonal harmony of the folksong arrangements. The rhythm and modality of the opening flute solo, and of the soprano aria (no. 2) which is derived from it, are clearly of folk origin. But whether in its unaccompanied or in its dissonantly harmonized form, the theme instantly calls to mind the second of Gerhard's 12-note serial Impromptus of 1950.

Gerhard's first ballet-score, Ariel, came about in 1934 as a result of a meeting between the composer and Leonid Massine which had been engineered by Antal Dorati—though, in the event, Massine rejected the music for ballet purposes as ‘too symphonic’. Two years later, Dorati was the catalyst for a second time when he suggested to Colonel de Basil (for whose company he was then conducting) that Gerhard would be a suitable composer for a Spanish ballet. Wishing to hear some of Gerhard's work, de Basil visited him one evening in Barcelona with Massine and the lead dancer of his company, and Gerhard improvised various pieces in appropriate style for them at the piano. His friend the poet Ventura Gassol—Minister of Fine Arts in the Catalan Government—was also present, at Gerhard's request, to lend moral support. After Gerhard's rendition, the talk turned to possible Spanish subjects for a ballet and the desirability of incorporating traditional Spanish styles of dancing into the choreography; and Gassol proposed an expedition by car to the town of Berga, in the Pyrenees, to see—as a fine illustration of what they were discussing—the ancient folk festivities of ‘Saint John's Fire’ which would be in progress that night.

It was not until the early 1950's, when the ideas of the young Darmstadt composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Maderna, Pousseur and others) began to seep across the channel, that Gerhard found himself indirectly influenced by the contemporary avant-garde: like them, he too came under the spell of numbers. Unlike the Darmstadt generation, however, Gerhard refused even temporarily to allow technical considerations to become the sine qua non for his music. Never afraid of appearing naive—and certainly not by then, in relation to composers half his age—he took a childlike pleasure in sifting through the debris of the post-war avant-garde explosion for such fragments of neo-serial technique as might be used to expand his own expressive horizons. Like Stravinsky (who came under the influence of Webern at an even later stage of his career), Gerhard was incapable of quasi-scientific musical experiment for its own sake; rather, his fascination with simple numerical relationships was to become inseparable from his concern for the proportional balance of harmonic rhythm as an essential means of defining structure.

I first met Roberto Gerhard when I was engaged in the writing of a book, ‘Making a Film’, about the production of Thorold Dickinson's film, Secret People, at Ealing Studios in 1950 or 1951. The scenario of Secret People called for a ballet, of undefined Southern European origin, in which one of the principal characters (played by the then unknown Audrey Hepburn) was a principal dancer.

Gerhard was not only the first important British composer to adopt electronic music techniques; it seems probable that he was, by a few months, the creator of the first British score to involve tape. From 1954 to 1959 his electronic music consisted of nearly a dozen works of incidental music for theatre, radio, and film, initially to provide special effects as an extension of the possibilities of a chamber ensemble—such as piano sounds played backwards (e.g. in the radio play A Leak in the Universe, 1955). By 1958 he had assembled sufficient equipment to make up a very small studio, apparently little more than a couple of tape recorders, at his home in Cambridge. It remained very small until his death in 1970.

There can have been few composers of unmistakable greatness who achieved recognition so late in life as Roberto Gerhard. In the issue of The Score magazine which commemorated Gerhard's 60th birthday in 1956, the editor, William Glock, could write: ‘His works have been almost entirely ignored, with the result that 20th-century music has been robbed of the impact of one of its most vital representatives. The catalogue of his works shows that only four, comparatively minor, works of Roberto Gerhard have ever been printed. What it does not show, however, is the fact that many first performances have also been the last; and that, as far as England is concerned, only two or three of his major works have ever been heard in public’ Today, if Gerhard's true stature has still to be appreciated he can no longer be described as a neglected composer. Yet even now he is known almost exclusively for the music he wrote during his final decade. For in the 1960's, as if stimulated by his belated acclaim, the composer enjoyed a flood of creative activity, producing an extended series of works all of which display an extraordinarily unflagging energy and invention. Like a few great composers before him (one thinks particularly of Janáčcek, whose late music shows a similar exuberance), Gerhard wrote his most youthful music when already well past the age of sixty.