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Between opera and reality: the Barcelona Parsifal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Catharine Macedo
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Extract

At midnight on 31 December 1913 the low string melody of Parsifal's opening rose upwards in the Teatre Liceu, Barcelona. That year-turn marked the end of the copyright period within which performances of Parsifal outside Bayreuth were prohibited, and made Barcelona the first city in the convention-governed world to stage Parsifal legally. Of course, the timing was a marketing ploy, but for many it was also a gesture of outreach, of stretching beyond the mountainous boundary of the Iberian peninsula and of hoping to become a credible cultural and political power in northern Europe. Alas for Barcelona, Europe didn't notice.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 97 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

1 Beckett, Lucy, Parsifal, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1981), 94,Google Scholar discusses the rush to perform Parsifal after the copyright had expired (Barcelona is not mentioned).

2 Balcells, Albert, Catalan Nationalism, trans. Hall, Jacqueline (Basingstoke, 1996), 1–54,CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides a historical overview of the Renaixença and Modernism from the Catalanist point of view. Much is written in Catalan about Modernism, though Marfany, Joan-Lluís, Aspectes del Modernisme (Barcelona, 1975),Google Scholar still provides one of the most thoughtful and well-researched discussions of the subject. Avíñoa, Xosé, La Música i el Modernisme (Barcelona, 1985),Google Scholar is the main work on music. For a useful selection of texts see Castellanos, Jordi, El Modernisme: Selecció de Textos (Barcelona, 1988).Google Scholar I use the term ‘Modernism’ in its broadest sense, denoting anything in this period that is clearly not Renaixença as ‘Modernist’.

3 Extract from an article published on 6 December 1900 in the important bi–weekly Catalanist journal, Joventut. Here, as elsewhere, all translations are my own unless otherwise stated, and all proper names are given as their Catalan versions.Google Scholar

4 This is the version given in McDonogh, Gary, Good Families of Barcelona (Princeton, 1986), 198–9. Retelling the event has itself been subject to a good deal of boundary blurring. Other accounts vary in the number of bombs (sometimes three) and when the bombs were thrown (sometimes the point in the opera in Act II where Tell and two friends swear to free their country from the foreign yoke). It seems more likely that the two bombs (as most versions give it) were thrown while people milled out of the auditorium for the interval: though a less alluring conflation of opera and life, this provided better possibilities for escape.Google Scholar

5 Italics mine. Maragall, , ‘Sant Jordi, Patró de Catalunya’, Obres Completes (Barcelona, 1947), 637.Google Scholar

6 For Wagnerism see Large, David C. and Weber, William, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, 1984),Google Scholar though Spain is not covered. See also Brown, Julie, ‘Schoenberg's Early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the Redemption of Ahasuerus’, this journal, 6 (1994), 51–80,Google Scholar and Sess, Anna Dzamba, Richard Wagner and the English (Rutherford, 1979), for coverage of related topics in other countries.Google Scholar

7 See Nadal, Alfonsina Janés i, L'Obra de Richard Wagner a Barcelona (Barcelona, 1983), for more information on the Wagneriana.Google Scholar

8 For Pedrell's biography, see López;Calo's, José article in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Sadie, Stanley (London, 1980), XIV, 330–2; for Clavé, see Guy Bourligueux's article in The New Grove, TV, 457. Clavé was the founder of the original Catalanist choir, the Euterpe, and director of the first performance of Wagner's music in Barcelona; Pedrell, devout Wagnerian and the self–proclaimed father of everything musical in Spain, exercised wide influence as a teacher.Google Scholar

9 Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London, 1995), provides a broad–ranging examination of landscape in general, and dark woods in particular, as important elements in the formation of north European nationalist ideologies.Google Scholar

10 Bages, Josep Torras i, ‘Del Verb Artistic’, Obres Completes (Barcelona, 1948), 364–84.Google Scholar

11 Pena, in Joventut, 3 (1902), 446–7, notes how in Spain people still talk of Wagner as if they were talking of the devil.Google Scholar

12 d'Ors, Eugeni, ‘En el Centenari de sa Naixensa’, Illustració Catalana, 10 (1912), 407, quoted in part in Janés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 144.Google Scholar

13 McCarthy, M. J., ‘Catalan Modernisme, Messianism and Nationalist Myths’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 52 (1975), 379–95, gives a perceptive overview of the Messianic colouring of Modernism at this time.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Eugeni d'Ors, ‘En el Centenari de sa Naixensaés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 150, Millet, from Lluís, ‘Transcendencia de la moral en l'art’, Revista Musical Catalana, 25 (1928), 199.Google Scholar

16 John, Nicholas, series ed., Parsifal, Opera Guides 34 (London, 1986), translation by Porter, Andrew, 84.Google Scholar

17 Wagner, in an early draft of Parsifal, before he fixed the location as northern Spain, described Monsalvat as being ‘in [a] wild, remote and inaccessible mountain forest’. See , Wagner, The Brown Book, trans. Bird, George (London, 1980), 47.Google Scholar

18 Quoted in Llobera, Josep, ‘The Idea of Volksgeist in the Formation of Catalan Nationalist Ideology’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 6 (1983), 332–50, 350n28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Alternatively see Gener, , Heregias (Barcelona, 1888),Google Scholar for full text in Catalan, or Gener, Cosas de España. Herjias nacionales. El Renacimiento de Cataluña (Buenos Aires and Barcelona, 1903), for the Castilian version.Google Scholar

19 Catalan spelling and grammar in this period was irregular, as the language had only been in common use by literate people since the 1860s. Montserrat was often spelt ‘Monserrat’.Google Scholar

20 Published in Teatralia, 3 (1910), 344.Google Scholar

21 Vilaregut, Salvador, ‘Las Representacions del Parsifal a Bayreuth’, Joventut, 3 (1902), 558.Google Scholar

22 Domenèch is almost anonymous biographically. According to an article in Pena-Anglés, Diccionario de la Música Labor (Barcelona and Madrid, 1954), I, 744,Google Scholar he was born in 1865 and was a pupil of Felíp Pedrell and Claudi Martínez i Imbert. He was elected a musical director of the Associació Wagmriana in 1904, a position which mainly involved playing reductions of Wagner's works on the piano. L'Apothéose musicale de la religion Catholique: ‘Parsifal’ de Wagner (Barcelona, 1902)Google Scholar was dedicated to Pena and translated into French by Jules Villaneau. The dates of Domènech's seminars, according to the collections XXV Conferèncias Donades a la Associació Wagneriana (Barcelona, 1908), 494, were 16, 23, and 30 October 1902. According to Janés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 95, they started on 17 July 1902. The dates of Pena's review of the book in Joventut indicate that the dates in XXV Conferèncias are incorrect.Google Scholar

23 Clearly, as a Wagnerian, Domenech was not likely to suggest that Wagner's life was lived through Klingsor. The other feasible alternative, Amfortas (a saviour–figure fallen to vice, as Wagner was often portrayed), would have been unappealing to Domènech's Maragallian vitalism.Google Scholar

24 Domènech, ‘La Tessis en el Parsifal de Wagner’, Joventut, 3 (1902), 479–83, here 479.Google Scholar

25 Pena's declaration is in ‘Clar i Catala’, Joventut, 1 (1900), 115. See Janés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 271, for information on Viñas's choir.Google Scholar

26 Domènech, ‘La Música’, in XXV Confèrincias, 375–436, here 428.Google Scholar

27 Arís's paper ‘Conferencia en Refutació d'algunes Afirmacios del senyor Domenech sobre Parsifal’ was also read to the Wagneriana. Its existence is mentioned in the forward to XXV Confèrincias but the paper itself does not survive.Google Scholar

28 Pedrell, ‘Nuevo Comentario sobre el Parsifal’ in Musicalerias (Valencia and Madrid, undated), 70–5, 70.Google Scholar

29 The editorial board included Pompeu Gener, whose opinion of the matter was that ‘critics are eunuchs’.Google Scholar

30 Domènech, ‘La Tessis en el Parsifal de Wagner’, 479.Google Scholar

31 ‘Quatre Paraulas i Prou També’, Joventut, 3 (1902), 501–4. Joventut professed to have an open editorial policy, though in practice this was open only in a limited sense, as Domenèch's experience revealed. This colonisation of his article also points to an aspect of Modernism rarely remarked upon, that of the obligation and coercion to fit in.Google Scholar

32 This is the opening of the first footnote. There are forty-five in total.Google Scholar

33 This collection is XXV Conferèncias. Domenech, however, continued revising his thesis on the Holy Spirit, slowly publishing a series of articles under the general heading ‘Parsifal and Sherlock Holmes’, where he spoke through the mouth of the famous detective as he ‘discovered’ the significance of the leitmotifs.Google Scholar

34 See Janés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 121–2.Google Scholar

35 Torres's articles are on 5 November 1913, and 2, 13, 27 January 1914.Google Scholar

36 The scene of the ‘Consegration of the Grail’ (Consagració del Graal) was widely known from performances in Barcelona, and it was frequently referred to as the ‘profanation of the Grail’ (profanació del Graal) by Wagnerians and non-Wagnerians alike, as a way o f distancing themselves from what they considered to be the ‘profanations’ of Barcelona performances.Google Scholar

37 Bignotti, Angelo, ‘Gran Teatro del Iiceo. Parsifal’, Diario Mercantil, 3 01 1914.Google Scholar

38 Rafael Moragas and Ricard Alarma were two of the Catalan scenery painters; both worked on some of the most important stagings of Modernist works. Quoted in Bravo, Isidre, ‘L'Escenografia Wagneriana a Catalunya’, Serra d'Or, 281 (1983), 15–22, here 18.Google Scholar

39 Quoted in Janés, L'Obra de Richard Wagner, 131 from an article in the newspaper La Publicidad, 11 January 1914.Google Scholar