Europeans had dreamed of probing the depths of the sea in controlled underwater voyages since antiquity. Early on, experiments bore some fruit: In 1801, for instance, the American inventor Robert Fulton made a five-hour descent to 160 feet off Brest in France, in a craft named the Nautilus (whose name Jules Verne appropriated), driven by a hand-cranked propeller.
But subs with engines for underwater running did not exist until Monturiol produced the second model of his Ictíneo, a name made up of the Greek words for “fish” and “ship.” The first version was only twenty-three feet long and displaced eight tonnes. She was driven by four crank-turning aquanauts, and one of Monturiol’s colleagues, perhaps his devoted wife who had been his constant companion in triumph and ill luck, made a flag: a gold star shedding light on a branch of red coral, with the Latin motto “Plus intra, plus extra,” meaning (roughly) “Far down! Far out!” Ictíneo I cost 100,000 pesetas, burdening Monturiol with a debt from which he never escaped.
It did not deter him. The trials of Ictíneo I in Barcelona harbor had been watched by many enthusiastic Catalans. Her dives were short, because she could only carry the air that was in her small hull at normal pressure. But the spectacle was enough to make her inventor a local celebrity, a Catalan Leonardo. Officials promised to bring the sovereign, Isabel II, to watch and witness. Discouraged by the pooh-bahs of her own Admiralty, she never came, but over the next few years Monturiol took his ship down again some fifty times. Meanwhile he was busy planning and building Ictíneo II, at fifty-six feet more than twice as long as the first model, and powered for undersea running by an ingenious chemical-reaction engine that did not require air to raise steam and actually created free, breathable oxygen. She was designed to dive to a hundred feet and stay down for seven and a half hours. Her design was brilliantly innovative but the research cost Monturiol and his socialist comrades a fortune—and, by their standards, not a small one.
They made more than a dozen demonstration dives in Ictíneo II over the next few years. She worked perfectly, the most advanced undersea craft ever devised. Further developed, she would have been a huge strategic gift to the Spanish navy. (What could a small fleet of Ictíneos, suitably armed, have done to Admiral Dewey’s battle squadron at that fateful engagement off Manila, which sealed the doom of the Spanish Empire?) As it was, all she got was a lot of press, with illustrations of Ictíneo hunting for precious red coral and engaging in combat with other subs. The torpid naval ministry in Madrid merely sent its compliments, not contracts or money. The mill owners and iron magnates of Barcelona only eyed the big fish with curiosity. In 1868 Monturiol’s creditors foreclosed on him and seized Ictíneo II. Having no commercial value as a ship, she was broken up and sold as scrap.
The failure of his dream broke Monturiol’s heart. Bankrupt and depressed, he eventually died in 1885, in his son-in-law’s house at Sant Martí de Provençals.
By then he was a forgotten man in Catalunya, but it may be that his old fame had spread to France. In the 1860s Jules Verne was plowing through his research for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Was Captain Nemo, commander of the supersub Nautilus, inspired by Narcis Monturiol? It seems unlikely that Verne would not have heard of Monturiol, or admired the man’s noble single-mindedness in adversity. Granted, Captain Nemo (whose name is the same in Latin as Ulysses’ chosen Greek name of Outis, “no one”) is unlike the mild Catalan. He is hugely rich, Monturiol desperately poor; Monturiol bent on brotherhood, Nemo on cosmic vengeance.
And yet there are similarities, too. Both men are utopians. When the narrator suggests that Nemo might be too rich to transcend his own capitalist interests, the captain fiercely turns on him: “Who told you that I do not make good use of it? Do you think I do not know that there are suffering races and oppressed beings on this earth…? Do you not understand?” From which Professor Aronnax concludes that “whatever the motive that had forced him to seek independence under the sea … his heart still beat for the sufferings of humanity.” The Nautilus, ranging free beyond the reach of land governments, is of course a country in itself and may be seen as a parallel to self-sustaining utopian states like Icaria.
THE SECOND MAIN PHASE OF BARCELONA’S SELF-CREATION, after the Old City had filled up, was the Eixample, which in Catalan means “enlargement”—the Cerdà plan, as it was called after its designer, a Catalan planner named Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer (1815-1876). It was one thing to demolish the muralles, those much hated emblems of Bourbon power over Barcelona. Getting rid of them was, as one observer noted, “the most ardent desire of every Barcelonan, the most popular and discussed idea in the country.” It was certainly not the sole property of the Left and its civic ambitions. But when the city burst out of its stone corset, what would be its controlling form? That was the big question facing Cerdà and everyone else who thought about Barcelona.
The first step was to destroy the walls. It took time. Whole sections of the Roman walls of the Old City have survived to this day. So have parts of the medieval walls. But of the Bourbon muralles, absolutely nothing remains, and the hated Citadel was transformed into a park whose best known occupant, for the last two decades, was a much loved albino gorilla named Floquet de Neu, or Snowflake, that recently died. I have never laid eyes on Snowflake. But Doris did, once.
Cerdà had studied civil engineering in Madrid. But his social convictions came out of his experience of working-class conditions in Barcelona: the overcrowding, the disease, the dreadful suffering. He was an indefatigable researcher, and his first book, A Statistical Monograph on the Working Class of Barcelona in 1856 was the first systematic effort anyone had made to study the living and working space of the city. It was very detailed and deeply alarming. While the bards of the early Renaixenca were warbling nostalgically about the need to bring back the glories of the Catalan Middle Ages, it was clear that in terms of hygiene and social services the ordinary working folk of the city had never escaped them. The more abuses Cerdà found, the more indignantly radical he became. The future would be a race between the betterment of Barcelona’s working and housing conditions, and the social implosion of the city. How to prevent the latter was the theme of Cerdà’s next, and principal, book, General Theory of Urbanization, and … the Reform and Expansion of Barcelona, published (after many delays) in 1867. A new world was coming, Cerdà declared; “We lead a new life, functioning in a new way; old cities are no more than an obstacle.”
The Eixample or New City would be the apotheosis of reason, the triumph of the grid, a perfect undifferentiated fabric. Cerdà would hardly have thought of planning something like the New City without the prototype of Baron Haussmann’s restructuring of Paris before his eyes. But there was a huge difference. Haussmann had to destroy the old Paris, whereas Cerdà had to destroy nothing. He was going to enlarge Barcelona by laying a uniform grid on what was, except for a few villages (Sarrià, Gràcia, and others), a blank slate. Nothing stood in the way of the grid. Thus, a utopian designer’s dream.
That was perfect for Cerdà, a utopian socialist, deeply affected by French ideas of ideal community. The lost egalitarian fantasies of Étienne Cabet, summed up in the ideal city of equal cells, imagined as Icaria, underwrite Cerdà’s grid. Cerdà thought of each of these blocks as a social cross section; there would be no “good” and no “bad” end of town. He envisioned an absolutely regular grid covering a land surface of nearly nine square kilometers. Actually, it could be expanded forever. Each district of four hundred blocks (twenty by twenty) would have its own hospital, park, and so forth, and would be further divided into hundred-block units and then into barris of twenty-five blocks, each with its own schools and daycare centers. Only about a third of each block (five thousand square meters) would be built on; the rest would be patio and green space, with at least a hundred trees.
But many such refinements went by the board, thanks to developers’ greed and graft and laziness, particularly during the long Franco era. The Eixample today is far denser and higher, more chaotic
in texture and generally more oppressive than Ildefons Cerdà could ever have imagined. Cerdà designed his standard block with 710,000 feet of built floor space and a maximum height of some fifty-seven feet, later increased to sixty-five. Over the next century developers managed to increase this fourfold, to three million square feet per block; an urbanistic disaster, a fraud on the public, and a travesty of Cerdà’s plan.
Even so, the Eixample is one of the most interesting urban areas in Europe. It grew very slowly; not until the mid-1870s, when the Catalan economy entered the boom decade known as the febre d’or or gold fever, did the blocks begin in earnest to fill up. By 1872 there were about a thousand residential structures in the Eixample and some twenty thousand people were living in them. Its streets were mostly unpaved strips of dust. There was little storm-water drainage, so that after deluges the water collected in standing pools on its vacant lots, breeding swarms of Anopheles mosquitoes which presented Barcelona with epidemic malaria. In 1888 the report of a sanitary engineer named Pere Garcia Faria made it plain that the Eixample was, from the viewpoint of sanitation, just as bad as the Old City and possibly even worse. The ideal housing had failed through the greed of landlords, who had turned the houses into “veritable slums, in which the Barcelonan family is imprisoned.” Health had caused the demolition of the muralles. But thirty years later, the Eixample was still swept by epidemics of cholera, TB, and typhoid, against which the authorities seemed powerless. And strangely enough—or perhaps not so strangely—the design of the Eixample found only limited favor with those who might have been Cerdà’s backers, the next generation of modernist architects. Some of them, notably Josep Puig i Cadafalch, loathed the New City and made no secret of it, though its buildings are now considered by many to be among its jewels. Puig derided its “sacred monotony”: “nothing equals it, except in the most vulgar cities of South America.” There was much, much more. Everything that would in the future be said against the Eixample’s heirs, from Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília, was already said against their common ancestor the Eixample. All critics felt that leaving the planning of a city to Cerdà, a socialist, was a big mistake. And not all the criticisms of its monotony were without justice. What saves the Eixample are its star buildings, and the exhilarating processional quality of some of its streets, notably Passeig de Gràcia. But it is not really a place to walk in, as is the Old City: Its plan lacks the charm of surprise, of urban respiration through changes of angle and scale that the older and more organic cities of Europe provide.
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 Ca
talunya 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:
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