Barcelona (9 page)

The three decades after the Burning of the Convents in 1835 were difficult times for Barcelona. The sites of razed convents stayed empty, and there was rarely enough public money to build on spots confiscated by the Mendizábal Laws. The Old City was jammed. The New City was essentially unbuilt. Only the Ramblas had been developed in the previous half century, and this, not Passeig de Gràcia (which had not yet turned into the magnificent boulevard it is today), was Barcelona's social spine, with its plane trees, restaurants, and cafés. The most important new building on it, which opened with pomp around mid-century, was not far from Plaça Reial, the residential square just off the Ramblas where much of its clientele resided. This was the opera house, or Gran Teatre del Liceu.

It was a peculiarity of Catalan taste that the city had practically no time for anything but Italian opera. Symphonic works? Instrumental pieces? Forget it.
Bon gust
(proper taste) for most of the nineteenth century dictated that even Beethoven's
Fifth,
written in 1808 and still considered harsh and novel, was not performed in Barcelona until 1881. But opera, so long as it was Italian, was a different matter. Starting in the spring of 1847 with Verdi's
Giovanna D'Arco,
the new Liceu served up a solid diet of it for fourteen years, until the opera house burned to the ground (between performances) in 1861. This so mobilized public loyalty to the art that the Liceu opened a subscription fund and with incredible rapidity was open and playing again in only a year. The reconstruction by Josep Oriol i Mestres was if possible even more splendiferous than the original, featuring acres of yellow-and-white marble, gilt, stucco, and bronze, and a ceiling aswirl with painted cartouches.

Barcelona was not yet a huge city, and its life at the top, both social and philanthropic, was dominated by perhaps twenty clans, most of them owing their fortunes to nineteenth-century industries. The Güells were to these as the Rothschilds were to the financial baronies of France, though the Güells were not Jews. If you were rich you did not absolutely have to be an opera buff to win respect. But it would be facile to assume that Catalan opera buffs were ignorant merely because they were rich. By the 1880s a serious audience had formed around the Liceu. As the novelist-critic Eduardo Mendoza put it, its strong bias in musical issues sublimated political debate, so that “for several decades the opera, with all its emotional content, offered the Barcelonans a convenient, agreeable duelling-ground.”

The Liceu was nominally a public place, at least for those who could pay for tickets—and it went without saying that no worker could. It had an attachment, however, the Club del Liceu, which one could enter directly from the upper floor and was entirely private, members only: the inner sanctum of privilege for box holders, their wives, their mistresses, and their friends. When the Liceu itself burned down in 1861 and again in 1994, the club survived the fires.

Today there is probably no spot in Barcelona that so preserves, as though in amber, the feeling of exclusivity which was part of the unspeakable joy of late nineteenth-century wealth. From its ground-floor entrance, sumptuously ornamented with stained-glass narratives illustrating climactic moments of Wagner's operas, to the highly decorated dining room, to the circular room containing a series of paintings illustrating boulevard life by the Barcelonan impressionist Ramón Casas—which feature an open touring car driving straight at you with its headlights ablaze with real forty-watt electricity and two pretty girls riding in it—the entire place is a masterful period piece, weirdly eclectic and perfectly preserved.

The first time I went there, almost forty years ago, I was taken by Xavier Corberó and, apart from two elderly Catalan gentlemen attired in tight suits and wing collars, we had the dining room to ourselves, and our dishes of
rap al all cremat
(monkfish with burnt garlic) and bright green peas with mint were served to us by waiters who looked older than the turtles of the Galápagos. Today this relative solitude would hardly be possible, because a later and younger generation of the rich have discovered the Club del Liceu and fill it to near bursting point every night, accompanied by girls of the
bones families
who, given a change of costume and maquillage, could just a moment ago have stepped out of a Casas painting. The waiting list for membership is years long, just as it used to be. In Barcelona, nothing old is out of date any more.

The Liceu was Barcelona's core image of high-bourgeois culture. But its programs did not sit well with all Catalan musicians. The problem was their content. The low emphasis put on purely orchestral work, the fixation on Italian opera and the disproportionate influence of private sponsors—all these were annoying. They reinforced the idea that the only “real” music came from abroad, a notion that true Catalanists found obnoxious. Moreover, the Liceu's policies seemed to imply that good, “cultivated” music belonged only to the rich. This snobbery collided with the ideologies of Catalanism and socialism, brewing at the edge of the Renaixenca, a conflict which came to a head over
cançó popular,
traditional Catalan folk music. The great supporter and defender of this musical form, who set off a grassroots revival of choral singing in Catalunya and whose work stimulated the Catalans to build one of their most extraordinary architectural masterpieces—far more important, as architecture, than the Liceu—was Josep Anselm Clavé i Camps (1824-1875).

Clavé was a musician, a song collector, and a socialist politician. His ideas about the role of music in society had been formed in the 1850s: initially, by a man named Abdo Terradas, a socialist agitator who preached that the democracy he wanted for Catalunya could only be reached through a broad class rising based on education, which would bring factory hands together with shopkeepers, artisans with intellectuals. Part of the key to this alliance would be musical literacy. Music, choral singing especially, brought people together. It helped men and women, Clavé argued, “who have been turned into mere laboring machines” to recover their damaged dignity and self-esteem through shared esthetic experience and cooperation. Choral societies, he said, would wean city workers away from the “sordid ambience” of their taverns, their drunken binges in search of oblivion. Self-improvement through musical education: It was not a joke, not something the nobs could condescend to. By the 1860s Clavé's nobly democratic influence had created workers' choral societies, known as the
cors de Clavé
, Clavé's choirs, all over Catalunya, for Catalans—especially the working class—loved voluntary association. He arranged their programs, recruited conductors, trained them, supplied them sheet music for old songs, and new ones as well.

Clavé's own compositions were very popular. “Els Flors de Maig—The Flowers of May” of 1859 was a perennial hit with Catalan choristers. He also wrote patriotic anthems, work songs, hymns to labor, and dit-ties in praise of folk culture and popular festivals. And he tried to carry on a career in electoral politics, though his efforts did not have any of the political effect of his musical work.

Some of the native voice, however, was not sung; it lived in recitation, or on the printed page. A bizarre instrument of cultural Catalanism was a poetry contest known as the Jocs Florals, or Floral Games. This competition was itself a revival of an older Catalan practice, which had fallen into disuse. Its object was to confirm that a great patriotic literature was being written in Catalan, which might stir Catalans into separatist fervor. To do this, it must be archaic in diction. As one Majorcan poet wrote in the 1850s:

 

Cec d'amor per un llenguatge,

que no tinc prou dominat

emprenc el pelerinatge

pel fossar del temps passat.

 

Blind with love for a language,

All too powerless today,

I set out on a pilgrimage

Through the graveyard of olden times.

 

The first poet to set out through the “graveyard” actually worked in a finance house in Madrid and, though unquestionably Catalan and much given to boasting piteously about the
enyoranca
(nostalgic longing) he felt for his native soil, did not actually go so far as to live on it. His name was Bonaventura Carles Aribau i Farriols (1798-1862). He had dreams of becoming a Chateaubriand, a Byron, exhorting his fellow Catalans to regain their ancient liberties and, especially, the right to use their native tongue. To this end he wrote an ode, “La Pàtria—The Fatherland.” It proved to be the work of art with which the Catalan Renaixenca began. For there he was, supposedly pining away in Madrid, and realizing that his native language—
la llengua llemosina,
the Catalan tongue—lay at the heart of belonging. It contains all his recognizable images from birth onward. Only in Catalan can he think straight. “Let me speak again,” he cries, in a transport of loss:

 

The tongue of those wise men

who filled the world with their customs and laws,

the tongue of the strong men who served the kings,

defended their rights, avenged their insults.

Beware, beware the ungrateful man whose lips utter

his native accent in a far country and does not weep,

who thinks of his origins without pangs of yearning,

nor takes his fathers' lyre from the holy wall!

 

For literate Catalans, resentful of the political dominance of Madrid, this was venturesome stuff. And even as a twentieth-century Australian, I found its moping and somewhat defensive tone—for the Catalans are quite capable of feeling those pangs of enyoranca without actually leaving their native soil—quite comprehensible, even familiar. Neither culture was fully self-sustaining: Aribau freely chose to work in Madrid, after all, whilst bemoaning his “exile,” and continued to do so long after publishing “La Pàtria,” even though he could presumably have worked in one of the other banks that flourished in Barcelona's energetic mercantile economy—and he felt a tad guilty about it, which led to poses of exaggerated independence and virtue. But despite his expatriate status, or perhaps even partly because of it, Aribau came to be seen as the founder of literary Catalanism, and his array of patriotic images would dominate the discourse of Catalan independence for the next half century, combining to form an idealized feudal past.

So every year, from 1859 on, a little elite of Catalans would gather in Barcelona to recite praises of Catalan virtue and Catalan history in terms so precious, stilted, and old-fashioned that few other people could understand them, even if they were Catalan. But their feelings about the need for Catalan as common speech as well as a literary medium were widely shared, for, as the arch-conservative bishop of Vic, Josep Torras i Bagès, wrote in
The Catalan Tradition,
“The word or the tongue of a people is the manifestation and glow of its substance, the image of its figure, and he who knows the language knows the people who speak it; once the tongue disappears, so do the people.”

Until well into the 1880s the Jocs Florals were considered the “spinal column,” as one writer put it, of the Renaixenca; they were taken as the annual proof that the Catalan language was the main conduit of elevated national feeling. They were, in a sense, a medieval revival, though the original Jocs Florals—a troubadour's competition, in which poets competed for prizes from the court—do not seem to have been held often. They began, supposedly, in 1324, when seven young nobles met in Toulouse and decided to invite poets and troubadours from all over the
paisos catalans
to take part in a poetry competition, an
eisteddfod,
the next year.

By the early 1400s, the Jocs Florals were almost a tradition in Barcelona and they offered three trophies. The third prize was a violet made of silver. The second prize was a golden rose. But the first prize was a
flor natural,
a real rose. It would wither and die, of course, but it was a reminder that no work of art could rival nature. The prize would fade; the poem would last in the hearts of readers.

The Jocs Florals died in the Middle Ages and were soon a memory, not a living tradition. They were not revived until nearly 1860, by which time the practice of writing Catalan verse began to consolidate again.

But one should take care not to put the cart before the horse. Catalan was not preserved as a language by the mere fact that some poets wished to write in it, and made big efforts to do so. What guaranteed the integrity and continuity of Catalan was, quite simply, common speech. People just kept speaking it, despite the ridiculous and, finally, unpoliceable edicts against it from Madrid, whose purpose in forbidding the language was to destroy the sense of self that a bludgeoned people retained. People do not speak a language because patriotic poems are written in it, and they do not give up speaking it because those same poems are censored. They speak it, and keep speaking it, because they learned it long before they could read. In Aribau's words, “My first infant wail was in Catalan / when I sucked the sweet milk from my mother's nipple.” If Catalan had not been spoken as the vernacular of the people of Barcelona and the rest of Catalunya, it would have perished, just as Latin usage perished, withering on the social vine. But it did not.

Catalan is a moderately difficult language for a foreigner to learn, but certainly no harder than Spanish or Italian, both of which, being descended from Latin, it closely resembles. Certainly it is not difficult in the acute way that Basque is. Nobody, including the Basques themselves, seems to have the foggiest notion where Basque comes from. It resembles no other tongue spoken on Earth; whereas Catalan's relation to Latin is clear and straightforward. It is the fruit of the Roman occupation, more than two thousand years ago.