Rodolfo Halffter

Rodolfo Halffter
Halffter caricatured by Bagaria in El Sol (1928)
Born	30 October 1900[1] Madrid, Kingdom of Spain[1]
Died	4 October 1987(1987-10-04) (aged 86)[1] Mexico City, Mexico[1]
Occupations	Composer music critic professor [1]

Rodolfo Halffter Escriche (30 October 1900 – 14 October 1987)^[1] was a Spanish composer, music critic, and professor with Mexican citizenship (from 1939). He wrote in a style always informed by his early engagement with the modernist aesthetics of Madrid's Grupo de los Ocho, finding inspiration in the music of Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Halffter came from a musical family. Though largely self-taught as a composer, he studied Schoenberg's Harmonielehre and was advised by Falla. His music has been compared to Domenico Scarlatti's in its neoclassicism and to Falla's in its mild polytonality.

Like others in his milieu, Halffter chose to leave Francoist Spain at the end of the Spanish Civil War. He emigrated to Mexico in 1939 and taught there for more than three decades, enjoying increasing recognition. Several notable composers are among his students. Starting in 1953, he became the first composer to use twelve-tone technique in Mexico.

Halffter returned to Spain beginning in the 1960s, where he also taught, and received its Premio Nacional de Música in 1986. He was also honored in Mexico, where he died. He wrote music in many genres and for many films.

Born in Madrid to a family of musicians, Rodolfo Halffter was the older brother of composer-conductor^[2] Ernesto Halffter and uncle of composer Cristóbal Halffter.^[3] His father Ernest Halffter Hein was from Königsberg, Germany.^{[citation needed]} His mother Rosario Escriche Erradón was of Catalan heritage and gave her children their first music lessons.^{[citation needed]}

Halffter was largely self-taught as a composer and influenced by Debussy and Schoenberg, having read the latter's Harmonielehre.^[1] He was also advised by Manuel de Falla, whom he met through composer-critic Adolfo Salazar,^[1][a] and whose music then owed much to Igor Stravinsky's neoclassical style.^[10][b] Halffter also met artists like Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca at the Residencia de Estudiantes, and he set the poems of Rafael Alberti to music in Marinero en tierra (1925).^[1] Halffter became counted among the composers of the 1930s Grupo de los Ocho, or Grupo de Madrid.^{[citation needed][c]}

He worked first as a bank clerk and later as a music critic for Madrid's El Sol, El universo gráfico,^[13] and La Voz [es].^[14] In the last, he praised Joaquín Rodrigo's Zarabanda lejana y Villancico [es] as "the exquisite product of a refined musician".^[14] He cofounded the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas in 1936 and was also Head of the Department of Music at the Undersecretary of Propaganda in the Second Spanish Republic.^[15] His brother Ernesto, by contrast, supported Francisco Franco.^[16]

After the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Halffter chose to leave Francoist Spain for Mexico,^[17] as only Mexico and the Soviet Union had supported the Republican faction.^[18] He was among many Spanish Republican exiles who did so,^[18] including Falla,^{[citation needed]} Salazar, Rosa García Ascot, Jesús Bal y Gay, and María Teresa Prieto.^[18]

Halffter arrived in Mexico in 1939,^[19] where he was welcomed by Carlos Chávez and Blas Galindo in Mexico City.^[20] He first taught at the Escuela Superior de Música [es] (1939–1940) and then at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música for 30 years.^[20] Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras [es], Federico Ibarra Groth [es], Mario Lavista, and Rocío Sanz Quirós studied music with Galindo and Halffter here before continuing their education at major institutions in Europe or the United States.^[21]

In 1946, he became editor of Nuestra música and director of Ediciones Mexicanas de Música.^[20] The same year, violinist Samuel Dushkin gave the premieres of Halffter's Violin Concerto, helping to establish Halffter's growing international reputation.^[20] Halffter may have participated in the 1954 and 1957 Festivales de Música in Caracas, perhaps placing him in the company of Roque Cordero and René Leibowitz.^[19]

Halffter returned to Spain on many occasions after 1962.^[22] He taught in Granada and Santiago de Compostela and participated in music festivals. He published a catalogue of Chàvez's music in 1971 for the composer's seventieth birthday and updated it after Chàvez's death.^[23] Halffter died in Mexico City on October 14, 1987.^[1]

Halffter wrote the majority of his most important works while in the Grupo de los Ocho.^{[citation needed]} They are typified by their mild polytonality, asymmetric rhythms, and clear melodic writing after Falla,^[22] and their neoclassical style has been compared to the musical idiom of Domenico Scarlatti.^{[citation needed][d]}

Halffter began to use twelve-tone technique, as the first composer to do so in Mexico,^[26] in Tres hojas de album (1953).^[22] This was at a time when the technique was becoming mainstream and had already become respected as somewhat antifascist.^[27] He maintained the melodic orientation of his prior style.^[22]

The Spanish government honored him with a concert in his later career, and he received further honors from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando and the Mexican Academia de Artes.^[22] In 1986, he was awarded Spain's highest award for composition, the Premio Nacional de Música.^{[citation needed]} He has been remembered as a composer working in the style established by Falla^[22] and as the first composer of twelve-tone music in Mexico.^[26] Galindo honored him in music with Homenaje a Rodolfo Halffter (1989).^[28]

• Don Lindo de Almería (José Bergamín), Op. 7b, from the ballet (1935)^[29]
• La madrugada del panadero (José Bergamín), Op. 12a, from the ballet-pantomime (1940)^[29]

• Piezas for string quartet (1923)^[30]
• Giga for guitar, Op. 3 (1930)^[30]
• Divertimento from Don Lindo de Almería for mixed ensemble, Op. 7a (1935)^[30]
• Pastorale for violin and piano, Op. 18 (1940)^[30]
• String Quartet, Op. 24 (1957–1958)^[30]
• Cello Sonata, Op. 26 (1960)^[30]
• Three Movements for string quartet, Op. 28 (1962)^[30]
• Ocho Tientos for string quartet, Op. 35 (1973)^[30]

• The Lady from Trévelez, dir. Edgar Neville (1936)^{[citation needed]}
• La mujer y la guerra, dir. Mauricio A. Sollín (1938)^[15]
• Christopher Columbus, dir. José Díaz Morales (1943)^[30]
• Michael Strogoff, dir. Miguel M. Delgado (1944)^{[citation needed]}
• Entre hermanos, dir. Ramón Peón (1945)^[30]
• Los olvidados [es], dir. Luis Buñuel (1945)^[30]
• Raíces, dir. Benito Alazraki (1955), in collaboration with Galindo, José Pablo Moncayo, and Guillermo Noriega^[31]

• Suite, Op. 1 (1924–1928)^[29]
• Preludio atonal, homenaje a Arbós (1933)^[28]
• Violin Concerto, Op. 11 (1940)^[30]
• Tres sonatas de Fray Antonio Soler (1951)^[28]
• Obertura festiva, Op. 21 (1952)^[29]
• Tripartita, Op. 25 (1959)^[29]
• Diferencias for orchestra, Op. 33 (1970)^[29]
• Dos ambientes sonoros, Op. 37 (1975–1979)^[29]

• Dos sonatas [es] de El Escorial, Op. 2 (1928, after Antonio Soler)^[32]
• Para la tumba de Lenin (1937)^[30]
• Homenaje a Antonio Machado, Op. 13 (1944)^[30]
• Sonata No. 1, Op. 16 (1947)^[30]
• Sonata No. 2, Op. 20 (1951)^[30]
• Tres hojas de album, Op. 22 (1953)^[30]
• Sonata No. 3, Op. 30 (1967)^[30]
• Homenaje Arturo Rubinstein (Nocturno), Op. 36 (1973)^[30]

• Dos impromptus y divertimento (c. 1931)^[28]
• Tres piezas, Op. 23 (1954)^[29]
• Elegía en memoriam Carlos Chávez, Op. 41 (1978)^[29]

• Marinero en tierra (Rafael Alberti) for voice and piano, Op. 27 (1925)^[30]
• La nuez (A. del Rio) for three-part children's chorus (1944)^[30]
• Dos sonetos (Juana Inés de la Cruz) for alto and piano, Op. 15 (1946)^[30]
• Tres epitafios (Miguel de Cervantes) for chorus, Op. 17 (1947–1953)^[30]

• Heile, Björn [et]. 2024. Musical Modernism in Global Perspective: Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet. Music in Context Series, gen. ed. Benedict Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-49170-9 (hbk). doi:10.1017/9781009491716.
• Hess, Carol A. 2023. "The Symphony in Mexico, Central America, and the Spanish-Speaking Caribbean". The Symphony in the Americas, ed. Brian Hart. Vol. 5, The Symphonic Repertoire, founding ed. A. Peter Brown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-06754-8 (ebk). ISBN 978-0-253-06753-1 (hbk).
• Iglesias, Antonio and Juan A. Orrego-Salas. 2001. "Halffter (Escriche), Rodolfo". Grove Music Online. Digitally published 2001. Retrieved 20 September 2024. doi:10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.90000380286. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• López Gómez, Lidia. 2024. "Soundtracks for the Republic: Musical propaganda in documentary films during the Spanish Civil War". The Routledge Handbook to Spanish Film Music, ed. Laura Miranda. Routledge Music Handbooks Series. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-032-00634-5 (hbk). ISBN 978-1-032-00639-0 (pbk). ISBN 978-1-003-17497-4 (ebk). doi:10.4324/9781003174974.
• Suárez-Pajares, Javier and Walter Aaron Clark. 2024. A Light in the Darkness: The Music and Life of Joaquín Rodrigo, fwd. Julian Lloyd Webber, ed. and trans. Nelson R. Orringer [es]. Music in Context Series, gen. ed. Benedict Taylor. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-1-32-400446-2 (ebk). ISBN 978-1-324-00445-5 (hbk).

• Rodolfo Halffter discography at Discogs
• Rodolfo Halffter at IMDb