Edit Author: Eva Moreda Rodríguez

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As is well known, following the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) a dictatorship was established under the rule of General Franco (1939–75), forcing scores of people, including Spain’s finest intellectuals and artists, into exile to various destinations—Mexico above all. Despite a surge in research on Spanish Republican exile during the last two decades, there is still much to do to cast light on this unhappy episode of Spain’s history. Moreover, compared with literature and the arts, the musical culture of Spanish Republican exile remains largely unknown and in urgent need of scholarly attention. From this point of view, Moreda’s book is a highly welcome contribution, preceded only by isolated monographs that, being focused on single composers or works, fail to offer an overarching view of the exiles’ musical culture. That the first book-length contribution to this field of study is published in English will surely help to encourage scholars outside Spain either to join in the task of research, or to use the Spanish case to think more broadly about exile and music.

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The death of Francisco Franco on 20 November 1975 was not a surprise. He died in Madrid after weeks of agony, covered by the press with obscene intrusiveness. After his death, the world celebrated the miraculous transformation of the longest modern European dictatorship into a democracy by means of a peaceful ''Transición''. Yet the ''Transición'' itself had begun with a general amnesty, inevitably leading to collective amnesia about Francoism and the Civil War. Even forty-two years after Franco’s death, nothing comparable to Germany’s ''Historikerstreit'' (1986–7), a public debate about the relevance of the Holocaust to Germany’s history, has taken place in Spain. Since the late 1990s, however, different disciplines have—albeit slowly—begun to shed light on cultural, academic, and political life during early Francoism. Eva Moreda’s study constitutes a further, notable piece of research in this complex jigsaw puzzle.
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Whereas the contribution of the exiles after the Civil War (1936–9) and the reappraisal of the cultural life during the Second Spanish Republic (1931–9) became top-level issues from the 1980s onwards, dealing with Francoist culture continues to be risky. Scholars have an ethical obligation to address the repression during Francoism, but to regard the work done by those who benefitted from the repressive atmosphere with general suspicion results in a moralizing instead of a critical attitude. Finding an even-handed perspective that is free of revenge, revisionism, or even harmonizing equidistance represents an intellectual challenge. Eva Moreda is to be praised for proposing a plausible and fruitful approach. It may not be a coincidence that she wrote her book as a Ph.D. thesis at Royal Holloway (University of London), fostered by an environment of unbiased scholarly curiosity.
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