Spanish Music Criticism in the Twentieth Century: Writing Music History in Real Time

This chapter examines how the documenting and reflecting on current musical life carried out by two Spanish music critics whose careers spanned most of the twentieth century – Adolfo Salazar (1890–1958) and Federico Sopena (1917–91) – provided a crucial foundation for the historiography of Spanish music after 1900. For decades, Salazar and Sopena have shaped our thinking about Spanish twentieth-century music; their works are still regarded as authoritative to a considerable extent and they are frequently cited as secondary sources in studies of Spanish music. Indeed, it is only in the last decade that their writings and biographies have started to be examined with a view to identifying and critiquing the master narratives they crafted to present and explain Spanish music of the twentieth century: the music they were immersed in and, in some cases, turned into history almost from the moment they heard it for the first time.