The fragmentation of Spanish society that then took place, and that led to the debacle of the Civil War in 1936, was felt most personally by De Falla who, in a letter to his friend Fernando de los Rios, the Republican cabinet member, writes in August of 1932,

"How painful is Spain!, and how it is being destroyed by the ones and the others!"

His limited capacity to create original music outside of Atlántida was palliated by embarking on a series of what he called "expressive interpretations" of old classic masterworks by the great Spanish polyphonists of the Renaissance and the early Baroque. Again, we find a composer, feeling disenfranchised from the land and culture of his birth, looking back to the far-off past as a way of detaching from the pain of the present.

Music historian and critic José Luis Garcia del Busto describes in his book on De Falla how, in August of 1936, shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, De Falla receives a fatal blow: he is notified of the execution, by firing squad, of his friend, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Collapsing physically and emotionally, De Falla, nonetheless, still remains in Spain until, at the end of the war in 1939, he accepts an invitation to visit Argentina, as the guest of honor of the Spanish Cultural Institute in Buenos Aires. In September, 1939, De Falla leaves Granada, muttering the following words to his friend and collaborator, the painter Hermenegildo Lanz, "Good bye, until eternity, perhaps in the bottom of the sea... Whatever Providence may will..."

His was a sadly typical example of the situation affecting a good number of Spanish composers, younger and, in many aspects, disciples and followers of the master's vision for the future of music in Spain.

The most poignant case among these, apart from the tragic loss of Antonio José , who, like Lorca, was executed at the beginning of the War near his birthplace in Burgos, was that of Fernando Remacha. Remacha did not leave Spain, but rather retreated into silence, opening a hardware store in his native town of Tudela, in Navarra, and not writing a note of music for 25 years. Eventually, Remacha returned to the creative life and, from the mid-50's onward wrote impressive works, including an excellent concerto for guitar and orchestra whose Madrid premiere I was privileged to perform in 1991.

Other young composers of this generation, known as Generation of 27, or Group of the Republic, did leave, never to return: thus Julián Bautista, who also died in Argentina, or Salvador Bacarisse, exiled in France. On the other hand, Gustavo Pittaluga, in Portugal, Ernesto Halffter, also in Portugal, or his brother Rodolfo, who settled in México, did all return to Spain at some point. However, they all felt the trauma of exile, and could never fulfill the promise of glory that, in some cases, was announced and predicted for them.

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