The National Library of Spain receives the documentary legacy of the pianist and composer Diana Pey Casado

The National Library of Spain has received the documentary legacy of the pianist, composer and pedagogue Diana Pey Casado.

The legacy contains, first of all, personal and professional documentation to clearly trace the profile of the pianist, explains the BNE: academic certificates, press clippings, concert programs and posters, photographs, correspondence.

On the other hand, Her role as composer is accredited by scores, parts, drafts and handwritten notes corresponding to nearly 150 documents.

The archive was located by the cultural manager Beatriz Fontán and the musician and researcher Samuel Diz during a research stay in Chile about the Spanish republican exile of 1939. Both carried out a first inventory together with the composer’s daughter and granddaughters.

Pey Casado trained at the Marshall Academy and at the Superior Conservatory of Music in Barcelona, ​​the city to which he moved with his family. He developed most of his musical career in Chile, where he had gone into exile in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War.

On board the ‘Winnipeg’, a ship chartered to transport exiles from France to Chile, he would develop various activities for children, as well as piano concerts offered over the public address system for the more than 2,500 passengers who were on board.

Furthermore, once settled in the Chilean capital, she worked as a pianist at Radio Cooperativa Vitalicia, concerts that were the family’s first source of income in Chile.

She resumed her musical training, interrupted by the conflict, at the National Conservatory of Music of Chile, where she was a student of composers such as René Amengual and Alfonso Letelier.

Likewise, he made several tours around the country, as a soloist or with groups such as the La Serena Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chilean Symphony Orchestra. His works ‘Sonata for flute and piano’ and ‘Sonata for two pianos’ won him two composition awards.

Her teaching work was framed in the Faculty of Musical and Performing Sciences and Arts of the University of Chile, a center of which she became vice dean and deputy dean. Political turbulence affected her again and in 1973, as a result of General Pinochet’s coup d’état, she was dismissed from all her university positions and was forced into a second exile, this time to Miami, where she died in 1988.