To set Joan Maragall to music after nearly dying

Being reborn after an accident: it sounds like a cliché, but we can't forget that clichés are often deeply ingrained truths. Or, at least, rhetorical fossils with a kernel of truth at their core. Just ask economist and writer Fernando Trias de Bes, who about a year and a half ago suffered a serious car accident that could have killed him, but from which he emerged reborn and creatively liberated.

When he tries to recount it himself, there's still a note of astonished surprise in his voice: "It was night. I was on my way to Seville. A girl sped towards me on a two-lane road. I was hit several times and ended up off the road, crashed into a wall. When I got home from the hospital, I started writing songs. I have a musical background, I've played the piano since I was little, and I compose regularly, but I'd never written one hundred and sixty songs in four months." The two poets whose works he has set to music most frequently during this compositional frenzy were Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Joan Maragall, who share a vitalistic quality, although Trias tells me that the music comes out differently when he composes based on the Castilian poet or the Catalan poet.

This is not the first time Fernando Trias de Bes has approached Maragall's poetry musically, a poet who, both during his lifetime and posthumously, had an intense and fruitful relationship with music. When Trias was only twenty-two years old, thirty-five years ago, he set the poem to music. The almond treeNothing comparable to what he has done now, in any case, when between April and May of 2025 he set no fewer than fifty-two poems by Maragall to music. "I decided to record fifteen of the songs in Marc Parrot's studio," he says, "sung by Roger Padullés and with arrangements by maestro Miquel Ortega on piano." The album, Living WordIt can be heard on music platforms in streaming.

The album title couldn't be more Maragallian, and it connects with the core of the author's poetry.Excelsior and Infinite Ode, who, in the inaugural session of the 1905 course at the Ateneu Barcelonès, delivered the speech In Praise of the Wordwhere he stated that "words are animated music" and that living words, those that are born only from a "strong desire for expression", always "carry a song to the soul, because they are born in the rhythmic pulse of the Universe".

Trias de Bes speaks of his almost epiphanic rediscovery of Maragall with a thoughtful and genuine enthusiasm: "Maragall's poetry has completely stolen my heart. He begins his poems in a light, almost childlike way, with an innocence that, at first glance, seems to lead you elsewhere, to something that doesn't immediately catch your attention, to a thought or feeling that you yourself have hidden in your soul, and suddenly you find yourself completely captivated by a symbolism and a spirituality that have no equivalent. And you don't know where you are." Trias's passion for Maragall wasn't limited to reading his poems. He also immersed himself in his biography, his worldview, his interplay of philosophical ideas and his sensitivity, and the lives of those who surrounded him, especially Clara Noble, the poet's wife and widow, with whom he had thirteen children.

From this comprehensive approach to Maragall's life and work, Trias conceived a musical and dramatic performance that will premiere on March 7th at the Palau de la Música Catalana, in a concert sponsored by the newspaper ARA. The tenor Roger Padullés, the actress Sílvia Bel, and a young pianist will also participate. The concert-performance will center around musical compositions based on Maragall's poems, but Trias de Bes has complemented them by highlighting "those everyday, family moments from which the poems emerged." He has chosen the figure of Clara Noble, "to whom we owe the fact that Maragall's work has not fallen into oblivion," to serve as a narrative thread through the poet's intimate moments. "I wrote an apocryphal personal diary," says Trias, "and the great actress Silvia Bel agreed to recite it. It's a dramatic work about Clara's feelings. She knew that Maragall would go down in history. How did she experience a relationship with a man who was in love not only with her, but also with poetry and nature?"

The woman next to the great man

Silvia Bel sees in Clara Noble a bit of "the same old story: the woman by the side of the great man, or at least the great poet. If these great men were able to soar so far," the actress recalls, "it was because they had the support and help of these tireless women, who dedicated their lives to enabling their husbands to soar far beyond the theater, art, and poetry, and in this sense it is crucial that someone takes charge of the seemingly banal but vitally important matters that are present in everyone's lives. Their wives or partners. Furthermore," she adds, "Clara Noble preserved and organized the poet's legacy, and it is partly thanks to her that Maragall has reached us in all his full dimension." Sílvia Bel says that, on this occasion, she prepared the text as she always does: "I try to avoid pretense and become what the text presents to me. When someone writes at home, in private, that has a truth to it, and that's what I then try to convey with my voice, disappearing as that presence that does it. I try to be, simply, Clara Noble through the words of Trias de Bes. And also the poet, when I read his poems."

Pere Maragall, one of the poet's grandsons—the son of his thirteenth child—says that Joan Maragall, beyond trends and aesthetic movements, "already has a symbolic status," and that everything about him is important and worthy of recognition, "including his articles, which are excellent." Pere Maragall acknowledges that within the family, the poet remains a constant presence, "just as our grandmother is." This is confirmed by another of the poet's granddaughters, Francesca Argimon Maragall, and her daughter, Lila Francesca Batlle Argimon, who champion "the sensitivity and profoundly humanist spirit" of both the poet and Clara Noble, as well as their way of "seeing the world through the values ​​of tolerance, respect, and openness." They also recall that if "the poet's legacy has been maintained throughout the years it has been thanks to the great work carried out by Clara Noble and her daughters and sons, with the transcription and editing of Maragall's work (overcoming critical moments such as the Civil War and the post-war period) and with the creation of the Maragall Archive, which has always been open and which in 1993 was ceded to the Generalitat of Catalonia."

Joan Maragall's relationship with music was always intense and fruitful, both literarily and personally. "Words are the most wonderful thing in this world because in them all the physical and spiritual wonders of nature embrace and merge": this is a phrase Maragall could also have uttered in relation to music. As Lluís Quintana, an expert on the poet's life and work, explains, "Maragall knew how to play the piano, he had musical knowledge, he regularly went to the Liceu—he was there the night in 1893 when the Orsini bomb, thrown by an anarchist, exploded—his library contained numerous scores of great operas, he translated..." Tristan and Isolde Wagner and was impressed with the Don Giovanni by Mozart, something amazing because at that time Mozart was known, but he wasn't the icon he is now."

In addition to Song of the FlagThe poem that Joan Maragall wrote expressly as the anthem of the Orfeó Català, which the composer Lluís Millet i Pagès set to music, was also a source of inspiration for the music lover Maragall, who also collaborated with the composer Felip Pedrell on an opera about Count Arnau, but the project ultimately failed to materialize. In any case, it is clear that Maragall's relationship with music was enduring and fundamental to both his life and his work. As Lluís Quintana says: "Maragall was part of a group of friends who called themselves..." the little ones Because they were all rather short, and together they attended concerts or hired chamber musicians. At these concerts, they could also perform contemporary works, not just quartets by Beethoven or Haydn. One member of the group was the musician Enric Granados, who would play them a piece whenever he composed one. And all this without forgetting what is obvious to anyone who has read Maragall's poetry: that for the poet, rhythm and musicality were of paramount importance.

In this sense, it is no coincidence that, after the accident, Trias de Bes's musical creativity focused on Bécquer and Maragall. Lluís Quintana recalls that in some poems from Maragall's first book, Poems (1895), "Bécquer's musicality is perceptible. Modernism and symbolism recovered Bécquer because they liked his non-declamatory, more intimate romanticism."

Fernando Trias de Bes suffered the accident that nearly killed him just three days before his second marriage. Aside from his injuries, post-traumatic stress, and what we might call survivor's euphoria, he attributes his recent creative frenzy to two things. "The first is that my main inhibitor, the fear that my music wouldn't live up to my work as a writer and economist, vanished. I stopped caring what people would say." The second is his profound connection with Maragall's poetry: "I read a poem by Maragall and it transports me to another world. Even the simplest poems resonate with me. The symbolism, the rhythm, the pantheism... His is a spirituality that transcends Christianity. The world today is desperately in need of meaning, and Maragall's poetry provides it."

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You can book tickets for the show 'Palabra Viva. A musical tribute to Joan Maragall' through from this link.