The broom, Maragall, the language, Catalonia
Today I'm taking a brief break from my economics articles. On Saturday night, at the Palau de la Música, the show about Maragall that I had the privilege of composing and which the newspaper ARA co-produced premiered. Before returning to my usual topics, I feel I must simply say thank you. To everyone.
I'm not just saying this from a personal perspective, but because there are times when a project ceases to belong to the person who conceived it and becomes something collective. I had that feeling very clearly on Saturday.
In his opening remarks, Ignasi Aragay noted that Joan Maragall's poetry is always a dialogue. A dialogue with nature, with the country, with the feeling of nationhood. But also with his wife, with his daily life, and with his own spirit. Maragall speaks to the world around him, but above all, he enters into a relationship with it.
Perhaps that's why the word that comes to mind to describe what happened is a word rarely used outside the religious sphere but very precise in the artistic sphere: communion.
When it works, art is exactly that: a communion between the performers (Roger Padullés, Sílvia Bel, and Miquel Esquinas), the work itself, and the audience that embraces it. And also a communion between disciplines, which for a moment cease to speak in separate languages. At the Palau, four artistic languages coexisted: poetry, narrative, the love story of Clara Noble, Maragall's wife, and music.
But every communion needs a vehicle. And that vehicle was the Catalan language. In a way, the premiere ended up being less a personal debut as a composer—though it was that too—and more a small tribute to the beauty of our language, our culture, our way of loving. Our language has the gift of turning words into music, poetry into emotion, and memory into the present.
It was also, of course, a tribute to Joan Maragall. And through the poet, to all of us who love our literature and the land that has made it possible.
When a performance ends and the audience leaves, what remains is not so much the work itself as that shared feeling that for a while we have all been part of the same thing. Perhaps that is what Maragall knew how to express better than anyone: the power of words to connect with the world. That is why I conclude with some of his words, written on broom bushes, which summarize better than any explanation this very Catalan way of communing with our land and thus merging into a single essence: Catalonia.
"I think that if we were to fill our spirits thoroughly with the scent of broom, we would be more ourselves: cheerful, frank, good, like good Catalans; that it would purify us of our flaws; and that when some foreigner wanted to form an opinion of us, he would say:
"Look, it's a town whose flower is the broom."