Stravinsky's neo-classicism was to be immensely influential in those composers that found themselves desperately trying to salvage the tonal language from the ravages of Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone, or dodecaphonic, system of composition. But the price he paid was steep, as the following assessment by one of Europe's most prestigious commentators of the contemporary music scene, Antoine Golea, demonstrates. In his Aesthetics of Contemporary Music, of 1954, Golea writes:

"The fate of music in the XX century seems to be essentially determined by the dominant personalities of Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg.... But a terrible danger has threatened for more than thirty years the contributions of these two masters...: active neoclassicism... The passing success of this frightful offensive is due, above all, to the untiring efforts of a personality who, by a diabolical mixture of talent, craftsmanship, opportunism and cowardice - because Lucifer is a coward, let's not forget it - has managed to deviate music from its true path and has brought it, after many attempts, close to desperation and death.... But an attack on Stravinsky, for it is of him that we speak... is to attack a man, that, to a degree, is innocent of the evil he accomplishes... because all of his activities are pre-ordained by forces that dominate him, sociological forces, above all, that have made of him the rootless person he is in his life and in his music... Nonetheless, failure is unforgivable when its ultimate cause is a weakening of spiritual forces. Lucifer is a coward, and because of his cowardice, has chosen evil... In the Hell reserved for those musicians that betrayed music because they were afraid, Strawinsky will occupy a preferred place, the first of all, without doubt."

2. Exile and Anguished Creativity

On the other side of the coin, the troubled cosmopolitanism of Stravinsky was paralleled in the situation facing other contemporaries of his that clearly belonged to the nationalist movement in music.

Such was the case, in particular, of the Spanish composers who left the country as a consequence of the Spanish Civil War that ended in 1939 and started the three-and-a-half decades of Franciso Franco's regime.

Most prominent among these, and master of them all, was Manuel de Falla, a friend and admirer of Stravinsky, but a very different personality, profoundly impractical and principled to the point of paralysis, who left his beloved Granada at the end of the Civil War and settled in Argentina, where he died leaving his magnum opus, Atlántida, unfinished.

De Falla's dedication to this vast project, a scenic cantata based on the epic and very nationalistic historico-religious poem by the Catalan priest Jacinto Verdaguer, which he had begun as early as 1927, made his creative output dwindle considerably years

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