Palau de la Música Catalana
The concert hall of Catalan choral singing is one of the most colourful interiors of Modernisme. The walls are almost entirely glass, and from the ceiling hangs a huge dome of stained glass like a sun. Sculptures of musicians and Valkyries surge out of the frame of the stage.
The Orfeó Català, a choral society founded in 1891, wanted a concert hall of its own. It commissioned it from Lluís Domènech i Montaner, who was also a politician and taught at the school of architecture. The building went up in 1905–1908 in the old district of Sant Pere, on a cramped site. Construction was paid for by the society’s members and patrons. It became an expression of the Catalan cultural revival, the Renaixença, and of Catalan Modernisme.
Domènech used a steel frame, which made it possible to replace the walls with glass. The hall therefore receives daylight from the sides and from a large dome of stained glass in the ceiling. Everything is decorated: columns with ceramic flowers, roses on the ceiling, mosaics and sculptures. On one side of the stage stands a bust of the Catalan composer Anselm Clavé beneath a tree, on the other Beethoven and Valkyries from Wagner’s opera. Behind the stage eighteen muses emerge from the wall, with bodies in mosaic and heads in relief. The façade has mosaic-clad columns and a large sculpture group depicting Catalan folk song.
The concert hall was extended and renovated in the 1980s and 1990s by the architect Óscar Tusquets. It became a World Heritage Site in 1997 together with Domènech’s Sant Pau hospital. Today hundreds of concerts are held here every year. The Palau de la Música shows how the ornament of Art Nouveau and new materials such as steel and glass could be combined in a building that was also a political and cultural manifesto.