Barcelona

by Robert Hughes

  Oddly enough, there are no references to the Hospital de Sant Pau in English travel writing of the day. Yet perhaps it is not so odd, since passing Anglo-American eyes, used to the punitive grimness of their own hospitals at the time, might not even have identified this marvelous complex as being a hospital at all.

  The quintessential building of Domènech’s career, however, was the Palau de la Música Catalana. It was the one real institution of modernist culture that rose in Barcelona in the 1890s, prospered thereafter, and continues undiminished today. It housed a choral society, the Orfeó Català, which had been created to carry forward the work of Josep Clavé, father of Catalunya’s folk-music revival in the 1860s. The Orfeó was started by two young men, neither of whom had ever met Clavé, but they both adored him and his work. Both were obsessed by cançó popular.

  They would expand Clavé’s work by using folk music as the ordinary public’s bridge to música universal, classical music. Their choral society and its Orfeonistes would mingle folk music with symphonic and choral works by Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Wagner, Haydn, Berlioz, and Mahler.

  Especially, there would be Wagner. Clavé had been mad for Wagner, but it was not a generally shared enthusiasm in Barcelona back in the 1860s. However, this changed by 1870, and now musical Catalanists saw the future, as one of them put it, in “Wagnerism, considered as an instrument and a sign of national culture.”

  Why did Catalanists make such a cult of Wagner? Because they saw in his work for Germany an achieved parallel to their own desire to create a myth of national identity for Catalunya. Wagner’s heroes had been to Catalunya. Their holy mountains were his holy mountains. “My name is Parsifal, and I come from Montsalvat”—Catalunya was Wagnerian Spain.

  And there was a more general reason. The antiquity of Wagner’s themes contrasted with the daring modernity of his musical forms. This fit perfectly with the spirit of the Catalan Renaixenca that now suffused the city’s most advanced architecture. Wagner had intended the Ring cycle to be the founding epic of Bavaria, as Virgil’s Aeneid was of Rome. Its mission was to describe the identity of the German race. Likewise, the Renaixenca was focused on, obsessed by, the supposed uniqueness of the Catalan race. It wanted to find its “modernism” by evoking an idealized past, albeit an absolutely mythic one.

  No wonder then that Catalanists saw Wagner’s operas as a guide to combining myths of a legendary past with the overarching myth of progress and innovation. Germany, too, was a culture identified with yearning and unattained idealism—enyoranca, as Catalan put it. Wagner’s vision of the “total work of art,” in which all media played a part, had a strong allure for architects who were working out of a deep craft base and sought to combine the talents of painters, ceramists, bronze casters, iron smiths, joiners, glaziers, mosaicists, and masons. All these are represented at an abnormally rich level of skill and display in the Palau de la Música Catalana, the most Wagnerian building in Barcelona—or the world.

  Detail of exterior, Palau de la Música Catalana

  Whenever I visit the palau it amazes me: One never gets used to Domènech’s invention and daring. Perhaps no architect has ever used color more subtly or riskily than this Catalan. His building is actually quite small: The site is only fifteen thousand square feet, a fraction of the Liceu’s. So there was not the space to amaze a public with sweeping architectonic effects. Color would do it instead. The foyer, its shallow vaults sheathed in pale ocher and aquamarine embossed tiles, and the staircase, with its squat golden-glass balusters, prepares you to enter the auditorium.

  You will not be disappointed. The concert hall of the palau is a large box of pink stained glass. From the middle of its ceiling a huge and spectacular claraboia swells down, like an inverted bell or a pendulous breast. Its motif is a circle of angelic choristers, diffusing a soft pink-and-blue radiance from high up.

  Domènech’s effort to dematerialize the structure of the palau even extends to the chandeliers that hang around the main columns of the auditorium without seeming to touch them, looking like colossal Byzantine earrings. Domènech has taken Gothic stone and glass and transposed it into steel and glass, making a perfectly explicit link between the ancient and the new. The main loads of the palau’s auditorium are carried on a steel frame, so that it becomes a glass box permeated by daylight. The decorative advantages of this arrangement are spectacular. The practical disadvantages of it were also large: Josep Pla, Barcelona’s essayist, complained with some asperity about trying to listen to Chopin against the background racket of brewers’ delivery carts rumbling over the cobblestones outside. The palau is a true curtain-wall building, one of the first in the world, and this is hardly to its advantage as a performance space. It has all the acoustic problems of that idiom.

  When finished, the palau cost nearly twice its intended budget (875,000 pesetas against 475,000). There was some criticism of this from the habitually frugal Catalans, who complained that the project lacked what they considered their national virtue—seny, or common sense. But to enter it today is to realize that it would have been cheap at five times the cost, especially after the brilliant restoration carried out in the 1990s by the architect Oscar Tusquets.

  As if the decorative flamboyance of the palau weren’t enough, it was also given a complicated sculpture program. It tells stories, and implies cultural affinities in some detail, following out Clavé’s belief in the continuity between popular and universal music, local and trans-national cultures. On the facade, for instance, música universal is symbolized by busts of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, and—who else?—Wagner. On one ground-floor corner, which juts into the street like a stone prow, is an allegory of Catalan folk song dominated by a figure of one of the rebellious seventeenth-century segadors, with his reaping hook and beret.

  The palau’s most spectacular sculpture, however, is reserved for the concert hall. This object, or perhaps “manifesto” would be a better word for it, is the proscenium, designed by Domènech to follow an idea by Lluís Millet. At first sight it is quite jarring, apparently made of white plaster (actually, a soft white pumice) which looks ghostly and weird against the solid riot of color from the hall’s ceramic and glasswork.

  On the left side, the proscenium arch depicts cançó popular, songs of the people. It bears a bust of Josep Anselm Clavé with a willow tree rising beside him. A garland of flowers is being plaited from his pedestal by an art nouveau maiden with flowing hair; another, below, gathers blossoms. The subject is a famous song written by Clavé, “Els Flors de Maig—The Flowers of May”):

  Under a pollarded willow, a girl

  joyously plaits her rich golden hair;

  her gaze is a cool crystal fountain

  wood-violets adorn her….

  On the opposite side of the proscenium, música universal is personified by a bust of Beethoven, between two Doric columns. (Doric, the order of the Parthenon, was considered the classical emblem par excellence, plain and masculine. Beethoven was taken by Catalans to be a classical, not a Romantic, composer. This view of him also obtained in his native Germany.) He is significantly lower than Clavé, who seems to be gazing over his head.

  Above that head, new music is being born. A rolling cloud of stone vapor, suggesting inspiration, starts between the Doric columns and boils upward—to morph into Wagner’s Valkyries on their winged steeds. They thunder silently across the top of the proscenium arch, toward Clavé and his willow tree—the inventiveness of new foreign music reaching toward the (literal) roots of old Catalan culture.

  Singers and orchestra are framed in this huge white metaphor as a permanent reminder of the Orfeó’s original purpose. Full color then resumes on the back wall of the stage, a hemicycle designed by the ceramist Eusebi Arnau, which forms a permanent background to the changing musical programs. It is made of trencadis, broken tiles, from which grow eighteen three-dimensional maidens playing eighteen instruments, from flute to zither. Their bodies from the waist down are flat with the wall and linked to on
e another by swooping garlands. But their heads and upper bodies, as well as their instruments, are modeled in the round.

  No modernista building in Barcelona was or ever would be as ecstatically received as Domènech’s Palau de la Música Catalana. It was, said the jury that gave it the Ajuntament’s prize for the best building of 1908, a demonstration of the “genius and art characteristic of Catalunya, strong as its race, great as its history and beautiful as its incomparable sky.” Naturally, as the critical fortunes of modernisme went into decline twenty years on, so did the palau’s reputation. Soon its neighbors would be calling it the Palau de la Quincalleria Catalana, the Palace of Catalan Junk. There was always complaint about its acoustical properties which, since the palau was essentially a glass box, were always faulty. Some talked of demolishing it. But the palau has never gone into eclipse and now, thankfully, it never will. What saved it from oblivion—apart from the architecture itself, in all its aggressive memorability—was its role as a nursery of musical talent and a condenser of Catalan patriotism. There probably isn’t a musician alive who, having had the luck to perform in the palau, hasn’t felt like complaining about its faults, not to mention those of the Orfeó Català itself. But it seems to enshrine the very heart of Catalan musical culture, and apart from Carnegie Hall there is no other musical institution in the world that evokes such intense, even furious, loyalties from great performers. Pau Casals was devoted to the place; the seven-year-old Alicia de Larrocha made her debut there in 1929; and I have never forgotten the sight of Montserrat Caballe striking her imposing bosom with an almost audible thump and declaiming, in the course of an interview we did on stage, that “tomorrow night I shall sing in my palau.” The palau’s management could be a tad conservative but it always caught up with advanced musical taste in the end, and it is the only cultural institution (there being none in the sister fields of literature or the visual arts) that managed to remain both Catalanist and international, and for more than a century at that, thus showing that a strong regional culture is not fated to be provincial, in Barcelona or elsewhere.

  THE MOST FAMOUS ARCHITECT—INDEED, FOR MANY PEOPLE today, especially foreign visitors, the single most famous human being—that Barcelona ever produced was killed by a streetcar one June day in 1926, as he toddled across Gran Via near the corner of Carrer Bailen. Evidently he was lost in thought and fairly deaf, so that he neither saw the No. 30 tram bearing down on him nor heard the passersby shouting their warnings. He was an old codger in a rusty black suit. His pockets were empty (except, by one account, for some orange peel), he carried neither identification nor money, and he was taken at first for one of the thousands of seedy old pensioners with whom the city abounded. Only later, as he lay dying in the public hospital, was it found that he was the seventy-four-year-old Antoni Gaudí, architect of the unfinished temple of the Sagrada Família and a dozen other smaller (but, many believe, better) buildings in and just outside his city.

  The Sagrada Família in the 1920s

  The Sagrada Família, or, to give its full name, the Templo de la Sagrada Família (Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family), is beyond rival the best-known structure in Catalunya. It is to Barcelona what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris or the Harbour Bridge to Sydney: a completely irreplaceable logo. Being unfinished, it is also much misunderstood, starting with the fact that so many of the millions of tourists who visit it every year imagine that it is a “cathedral.” But Barcelona had already had a perfectly fine cathedral since feudal times. The Sagrada Família was intended to be what its name says: a “temple,” where Catalans (and, Gaudí hoped, eventually the whole Catholic world) would converge to do penance for the sins of “modernity,” sins which had so horribly and mortally offended Christ, his Virgin Mother, and—presumably when he wasn’t busy carpentering—Christ’s stepfather, St. Joseph. Viewed in the context of Church history, this made sense, admittedly of a somewhat lugubrious kind. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church felt it was under siege from all those forces of atheism, scientism, disobedience, and doubt, which its hierarchy rolled together into the portmanteau word, modernism. Because of this, massive rearguard actions were fought by Rome. There was Pope Pius IX’s “Syllabus of Errors,” launched against the threat of a growing liberalism and listing just about every conceivable advanced or critical idea about sin, belief, and duty as a loathsome heresy, to be punished in hellfire. Extreme dogmas were promulgated, such as that of papal infallibility. It is probably true to say that between 1830 and the death of the ultraconservative Pope Pius IX in 1878, the Catholic Church became more ferocious in its perception of heretical threat than it had been since the time of the Crusades. It could no longer burn the actual bodies of sinners, but it certainly could and did cut them off from the body of the Church and participation in the Sacraments, and threaten them with eternal punishment in the afterlife. And Gaudí, to whom a penitential relationship with an implacable God was the very core of religious belief, was just the architect to convey this in stone. What the Church wanted was a new Counter-Reformation, based on an extreme ratcheting-up of cultic devotion to Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Gaudí conceived his temple as a means to that end. It would be an ecstatically repressive building that would help atone for the “excesses” of democracy: Not only was Gaudí more Catholic than the pope, he was more royalist than the king, not that he thought the king was worth much compared to the pope. Anyone so misdirected as to imagine that radicalism in art is in some necessary way connected to radicalism in politics, and that its purpose is to make men happy, might think about Gaudí and be corrected. “Everyone has to suffer,” he once told a disciple. “The only ones who don’t suffer are the dead. He who wants an end to suffering wants to die.”

  Gaudí was born in 1852 in Reus, a fair-size provincial town in the Baix Camp (lower plains) of Tarragona. He came from an artisan family of metalsmiths who had married into the families of other smiths, for generations back. Their workshop near Reus was known as the Mas de la Caldera, or “caldronmaker’s house.”

  The country around Tarragona, when Gaudí was a boy, had changed little since it was parceled out to Roman settlers nearly two millennia before. Gaudí developed a passionate curiosity about its plants, animals, and geology. Nature, he said later, was the “Great Book, always open, that we should force ourselves to read.” Everything structural or ornamental was already prefigured in natural form, in limestone grottoes, a beetle’s shining wing case, or the twisty corrugations of an ancient olive trunk.

  Gaudí never ceased to draw on, and from, nature. Each paving block of Passeig de Gràcia features a starfish and an octopus, originally designed for the Casa Batlló. Turtles and tortoises support the columns of the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Família, which also has thirty different species of stone plants copied from the vegetation of Catalunya and the Holy Land. Mushrooms become domes, or columns with capitals. The columns of the Güell Crypt are a grove of brick trunks, sending out branches—the ribbed vaults—that lace into one another.

  Gaudí knew and never forgot country building in stone, clay, and timber—materials (he said, with a sovereign disregard for the leisure hours of common folk, which he expected them to sacrifice willingly for the greater glory of God and perhaps of Gaudí, too) that “can be gathered by the peasants themselves in their spare time between their labors.” Thus the rough stone walls of terraces in the Baix Camp became the “rustic” colonnades of the Güell Park. In the latter years of his life, when making the figures for the Nativity facade of the Sagrada Família, he made literal transcriptions from nature by chloroforming birds and even a donkey so as to cast them in plaster. Sometimes this effigy-making was of a rather more gruesome kind: Since nobody, and certainly not the bristly and childless patriarch Gaudí, could induce a live baby to be still, when he needed infants for his scene of the “Slaughter of the Innocents” on the Nativity facade he got permission from the nuns in the old Hospital de la Sant Creu to cast the corpses of stillborn babies in p
laster. There exists an old photo of one of Gaudí’s studios, looking like a charnel house or perhaps the dreadful ogre’s cave of Polyphemus in The Odyssey, with plaster limbs and bodies hanging on every wall.

  But what mattered most to Gaudí was twofold. First, the forms and structural principles that could be deduced from inanimate matter, such as plants. And second, his own artisan background.

  This ancestry mattered immensely to the architect. He thought of himself, not as a theoretician, but as a man of his hands. He said, no doubt truthfully, that he learned about complex curvatures and membrane structures by watching his father beat iron and copper sheets, making up the forms without drawing them first, producing the miracle of volume and enclosure from the banality of flatness. It is a fact that tells you almost all you need to know about why Gaudí was not a “modern” architect, in the Mies-Gropius-Le Corbusier sense of “modernity.” Unlike such people, unlike even his Catalan contemporaries Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch, he thought in terms of manual not conceptual space. Others were ruled by the grid; Gaudí didn’t give beans for it. His mature work cannot even be imagined adequately from flat drawings. Its surfaces twist and wiggle. The space flares, solemnly inflates, then collapses again. Gaudí did not like to draw; drawing did not preserve enough information about the complex volumes and hollows he carried in his head. He much preferred to make models, from wood, paper, clay, or cut turnips.

  Gaudí’s instinctive preference for the haptic over the conceptual worked against him when he entered the school of architecture, housed in the Llotja in Barcelona, where he would study from 1873 to 1877. Because abstractions bored him and he did not think easily in terms of orthographic projection (T-square architecture: plan, elevation, section), he did poorly as a student—not the first time that a genius at school has seemed not to be one. His teachers were far more interested in transmitting the basics of Greco-Roman planning and ornament than in teaching what most interested Gaudí, rural vernacular building (“architecture without architects”) and Catalan medievalism. Both fused, or so he came to believe, in a unique sensibility which was nationalist at root and could only be expressed in Catalunya. “Our strength and superiority lies in the balance of feeling and logic,” he wrote, “whereas the Nordic races become obsessive and smother feeling. And those of the South, blinded by the excess of color, abandon reason and produce monsters.” This, though untrue, reveals not only Gaudí’s regionalist mind-set but also, in its last five words, his acquaintance with Goya’s “Caprichos.”