Image: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
The MNAC presentation identifies the work as ‘Cantata en la tumba de Federico García Lorca’ by Jaume Pahissa, dated 1937, and describes ESMUC’s performance as a recital of the poem with music, retaining both the literary and musical elements in the form of the event.
Pahissa was born in Barcelona in 1880 and died in Buenos Aires in 1969; the MNAC material also identifies him as having gone into exile following the Spanish Civil War. Those biographical details place the composer’s life between the two cities named in the presentation and explicitly connect his exile to the war.
The cantata premiered in Buenos Aires in 1937 with Margarida Xirgu’s company. The same account says that there is no record of subsequent theatrical productions, specifying the absence of documented later stagings in theatrical form rather than making a claim about every possible later performance.
