The Cercle del Liceu dining room is suddenly a party in memory of Roger Alier. The president of the entity, Francisco Gaudier, has gone on sick leave, but he is to blame for the fact that more than 60 members have run to celebrate the good and best of this erudite historian, opera critic for this newspaper for decades and brilliant popularizer who It changed the lives of many of those present. They tell it while the coffees arrive.
Alier died in June, weeks before the Liceu honored him with the well-deserved Gold Medal. He would be the first of four club members with significant careers in Barcelona’s cultural life who would transfer this summer. Llucià Homs, president of the entity’s culture commission, cites them: Manuel Bertrand, businessman and music lover who presided over the Societat d’Antics Propietaris del Liceu; Luís López Lamadrid, co-founder and director for years of the Peralada Festival, and patron Antoni Vila Casas. The Circle will dedicate lunches to them, one per month following a chronological order. In this first one, chaired by the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, half a dozen take the floor, starting with her pupil and critic for La Vanguardia.
“With Roger you always learned. And although it sounds corny, it reminded you that there are good people in the world,” Jordi Maddaleno begins by saying. A vital, existential, musical and humorous driving force, Roger, he adds, “promoted that cultural idea of ??going to the origins and remembering that operatic life on Barcelona’s Rambla began, not at the Liceu, sorry, but at the Teatre Principal. Because in addition to being a popularizer, he was a historian who contextualized, moving away from the clichés of opera.” “If now he came and saw us all he would regret it. ‘What have I done wrong? What are you doing here?’ he would say.”
He did not like tributes, his recognition was that people confessed that because they had him as a professor at the University, or because they had read one of his books or attended one of his conferences, they had fallen in love with opera.
The journalist Marcel Gorgori also takes the floor, choosing the word generosity to define him – “I confessed to him that I was losing my English and he decided that we would speak it at our meals.” Amador Ferrer, cousin of the honoree, glosses the family context and remembers the eminent psychiatrist who was the father. Alier kept a diary in Dutch for years, he reveals, just so as not to lose one of the various languages ??he spoke: “I don’t know if we will locate it, nor do I know if we will locate my uncle’s memoirs, which should be published together with a hagiographic writing which I have found,” he points out.
The historian Francesc Fontbona remembers his university years – “he was a monster, he knew everything before opening the book; he talked about the second world war day by day ”–; Fernando Sanz thanks him for pushing him to co-found the magazine Ópera actual…, and, finally, Oriol Coll shows a video fragment of a long interview that he did with him in his apartment on Gran Vía before he died. “Roger, we still love you!” Mercedes Arnús throws into the air like a kiss.