Baltasar Samper. Entre dues aigüesl'art i el compromís

Abstract

The musician Baltasar Samper i Marquès (Palma, 1988 – Mexico City, 1966) has until today been a semi-forgotten and secondary figure in Catalan musical chronology and historiography, treated only from clichés repeated by the various authors who have conditioned him the reception, and reduced almost to a sad caricature of what was his intense artistic, intellectual and political life, before and after the Spanish Civil War. The aim of this thesis has been to precisely observe all this activity in detail, and thus we have been revealed to us a first-rate author who leads, drives and fills the musical Noucentisme with content and connects it with a progressive and profound republicanism, and a radical Catalanist agenda; and he does it from all the fronts of the artist: composition, criticism and dissemination, orchestral direction, interpretation and musicological research. Samper is, from this point of view, an activist, a politically committed musician who combines his creative excellence with his ideology, in Barcelona and Mallorca, and with this combination he is consistent until the end, until exile in France and Mexico. This leads him inexorably to abandonment and oblivion. The case of Baltasar Samper allows us to attend to two areas that until today had been little or not at all observed by Catalan musicology, and in any case, never sufficiently resolved: the relationship between music and Noucentisme, and the condition and performance of the Catalan exiled musicians in the civil war diaspora and their subsequent reception during the late Franco regime and the post-francoist Transition.