Among those who went into exile during the Civil War were the musicologists and critics Adolfo Salazar and Jesús Bal y Gay, the composers Roberto Gerhard, Salvador Bacarisse, Rodolfo Halffter, and Julián Bautista, and the cellist Pau Casals. Manuel de Falla, the Spanish composer who enjoyed an international reputation and whom the Franco regime quickly identified as an invaluable asset for its own prestige, left in fall 1939 for Argentina, where he would die seven years later without ever having returned to his home country. For a complete discussion of Falla's complex position during the Civil War and the years of his exile, see Carol A. Hess, Sacred Passions: The Life and Music of Manuel De Falla

Falla and the Francoist governmentThe strategy of music critics and journalists acted as a complement to the moves of the Franco regime to enlist Falla's support as a way of legitimising its cause; such advances will be briefly described in the present section by referring to the existing bibliography on the subject which, however, has devoted less attention to the appropriation of Falla in the musical press. The interest of the Franco regime in Falla was evident in the developments which followed the composer's death, as a bitter struggle developed between the Francoist government and the Spanish exile community in Argentina, with both parties reclaiming Falla's body and, ultimately, his memory. Finally, the Spanish Embassy, with the mediation of Juan Domingo Perón's government, managed to embark the embalmed corpse on a ship for Spain one month after his demise in a quick and silent operation to avoid the protests of the Spanish exile community or of the Argentinean population.

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Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julián Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in Spain, an interest which continued after the composer's death in 1961. By exploring Bautista's presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Música de América y España, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the régime, and the cultural values and historical narratives that underpinned them.

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