In Praise of the Spoken and Sung Word by Clara Noble and Joan Maragall

BarcelonaElegant tribute to Joan Maragall and Clara Noble at the Petit Palau de la Música on the premiere of project Living Wordby Fernando Trias de BesOrganized by Sing Us and the ARA, the event was described as "a celebration of words" and "a beautiful and magical possibility," as Pere Agustí Maragall, the poet's great-grandson, remarked just before the recital. For nearly an hour and a half, a marital dialogue unfolded, imbued with sensitivity, humor, and tenderness, between the apocryphal diary of the woman, written by Trias de Bes, and some fifteen poems; between the thoughts of the woman, Clara Noble, recited by the actress Sílvia Bel, and the verses of the husband, Joan Maragall, sung by the tenor Roger Padullés, who participated in [the event] a few weeks ago. the opera Tristan and Isolde Wagner at the LyceumAnd accompanying Bel and Padullés was the pianist Miquel Esquinas.

Trias de Bes has set about fifteen poems to music, among which The blind cow, The Jordà beech forest, The Infinite Ode and The soul of flowersThe scores are delicate and restrained, with a logical concession to the epic in theExcelsior final and to Song of the FlagBut overall, it displays a very appropriate sensitivity to the emotional and poetic material, which grapples with the joy and doubt of love, idealism, and nature. It all begins and ends with Joan Maragall's funeral on December 22, 1911, and progresses by offering biographical glimpses of a couple who had thirteen children and the context of the country at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, including the Liceu bombing of 1893. ~BK_SLTs is excellent in his role and serves a very well-crafted dramaturgy about Noble's relationship with Maragall, especially with poetry and its absences. "What if I am more loved when I am not there? What if my absence is the marvelous flower that speaks?" she wonders through Bel. "Love is nourished by thought and absence," he declaims through Padullés. Faced with Maragall's silence and Noble's sorrow, soothed by humor—Noble sometimes jealous of nature and of poetry itself—Trias de Bes chooses not sentimental cataclysm, but the triumph of love, because the poet of flowers is also Clara Noble's poet. "And then I understood everything: that I was in the June broom, in the bud on my breast," exclaims Sílvia Bel. "I see flowers, and I think of you," sings Padullés.

The audience, which included a large contingent of the Maragall family, laughed shyly when he played and remained silent throughout the recital, until finally giving a standing ovation to the performers and Trias de Bes.