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2023, the centenary of a birth
This year, 2023 we celebrate the centenary of the birth of the great performer Victoria de los Ángeles. In numerous places you will come across information about her career and her achievements. In today’s article visit one of the most special museums in Barcelona to connect directly with the origins of this Catalan singer.
The Barcelona Music Museum
The Music Museum dates back to 1946, but the origins of the collections began a few years earlier, in the 1920s. At first it was located on part of the second floor of the Higher Conservatory of Music on c/Bruc . In the 1980s the museum headquarters moved to the Baró de Quadras Palace, on Av/Diagonal. Today this modernist building is the headquarters of the Ramon Llull Institute. In 2007 the new Museu de la Música was inaugurated in the same building as the L’Auditori. It has a collection of more than 2,000 instruments of which about 500 are on display.
A very particular collection
A visit to the Music Museum is a circular route. After the entrance where the protagonists are instruments from different periods and origins, we begin our historical tour. A journey through time from what are “apparently” the oldest instruments in the collection. This space is where we stop on our visit today to look at the collection from the medieval and renaissance era. However a closer look reveals that the instruments that are on display in this corner look quite new. The information on the display case confirms that almost all are from the 1940s. How can that be?
Back in time, a year before the Civil War
This mystery has an explanation. To discover what occurred we have to go back to the beginning of the 20th century, to 1935, to a Barcelona with an extraordinary cultural and musical movement. At that time, a group of young music lovers led by the musicologist Josep Maria Lamaña and advised by Higinio Anglés created the group Ars Musicae.
The interest of these amateur musicians was the study and interpretation of music until then unknown to the public and even most musicians. They analyzed manuscripts and combined research work to recreate those historical scores. Focusing on the repertoire from the medieval and Renaissance era, they needed musical instruments that were not the everyday ones.
Original vs Copied Instruments
The musicians’ idea was to commission copies of instruments kept in museums throughout Europe. Thus, they began a movement, interested in what is known as Ancient Music. Over the years that the Ars Musicae group was active, they managed to have a considerable number of instruments copied. From recorders, transverse flutes, chirimia, bombards, crumhorns, bagpipes, basses, trumpets, cornets and trombones, to bowed and hand violas, lutes and percussion instruments. Many of these instruments were made by European builders and we also found a reference to a Lute maker from Barcelona, Ignacio Fleta.
And Victoria de los Ángeles touched them, but for a short time
In the years of her first steps in the world of music, a very young Victoria de los Ángeles came into contact with that group of musicians who dreamt of performing that ancient music. Somewhat surprisingly, she began her musical journey with the group playing an instrument, not singing. Thus, in her first concerts, she appears playing the recorder. Josep Maria Lamaña himself, aware of the singer’s talent, invited her to give up the flute and go to Geneva to study singing.
We imagine Victoria next to the instruments of the Museum
In 1980 the musicians who were part of the group began to have such important musical relevance that they left the group becoming professional musicians of early music. When the group dissolved they donated almost a hundred instruments to the Music Museum. Knowing the story we visit the collection in another way. Approaching the showcase of those old but new instruments, which are strange to us but were once usual for musicians like Victoria de los Ángeles, Montserrat Torrent or Jordi Savall.
