One of the main speakers of the opera is leaving, a passionate about the genre, a scholar of the history of this art who also served as a great communicator. His entertaining lectures and his publications had made him a key figure in the renaissance of operatic fans in Catalonia. Roger Alier (Los Teques, Venezuela, 1981) has died at his home in Barcelona on the morning of this Thursday, June 29, at the age of 81 due to an organic dysfunction that had kept him hospitalized weeks before.
A music critic for La Vanguardia since 1987, the name of Roger Alier had been associated with this header for decades. He had practiced his profession in various national and foreign publications, had published various books, whether biographies, such as Luciano Pavarotti’s, but also treatises and dictionaries that are of absolute reference. In the eighties he had participated in commissions such as the production of the collectible Historia del Gran Teatro del Liceo.
The Gran Teatre planned to present him with its Gold Medal this July. A distinction with which the lyrical coliseum recognized his contribution to exalting the institution as a benchmark in the operatic field and praised his work as a popularizer, with innumerable criticisms in which he always reflected his bond and esteem for the theater.
“With his transfer, a charismatic person leaves, a person with encyclopedic knowledge about opera, but not only: he also had knowledge about other curious metiers -said the artistic director of the Liceu, Víctor García de Gomar-. An inveterate traveller, that he spoke many languages ??and that he was greatly admired and loved by singers. And on the other hand, Roger has trained numerous people in his facet as a popularizer. We will find him missing”.
Roger Alier dies having had a very full life, manages to say his disciple and also critic of La Vanguardia, Jordi Maddaleno. And although he has not lived to collect the High School Medal, he has become aware of the recognition that the city theater gave him. “It is something very unexpected that I did not count on. If I have not done anything else that I loved! They reward me for doing what I have liked to do all my life, which is to talk about opera”, Alier had declared when he realized to know the news.
It was 1963 when he made his first collaboration with the Liceu. The then businessman in charge, Joan Antoni Pàmias, was totally impressed by the fact that he wrote opera in Catalan and commissioned him to produce the programs, which were always done in Spanish.
His command of the language during the Franco regime was due to the lessons he had received from his mother as a child, when the family lived in Nueva Guinea. “My mother had no other job than to teach the child that I was. She taught me Spanish, Catalan and English, all at the same time, and also to type and play the piano. At the age of five I played it better than now”, Alier joked.
The son of psychiatrist Joaquim Alier i Gómez, exiled in Venezuela, he moved with his parents to the United States, Australia, New Guinea and the Island of Java, where he attended primary school in English and Dutch, the foundation of a broad polyglotism that conditioned and characterized your personality.
In 1951 he moved to Barcelona where he studied piano at the Liceo Conservatory and studied Modern History. He investigated the figure of Joan-Pau Canals i Martí, Baron de la Vallroja. He obtained the qualification of “cum laude” and the extraordinary doctorate award with the thesis Els orígens de l’òpera a Barcelona (The origins of opera in Barcelona), in 1979, a fundamental contribution to the knowledge of the history of music. en Catalunya, later published by the Institute of Catalan Studies.
He also studied aspects of modernist music, such as La Societat Coral Catalunya Nova (The New Catalonia Choral Society), in 1975. During the years 1971-1977, he was responsible for the universal and Catalan music section of the Gran Enciclopedia Catalana , where he collaborated closely with Max Cahner. He was a critic in the Serra D’Or magazine of the Avui newspaper.
Professor of Music History at the University of Barcelona since 1979, he was one of the most valued teachers at the Faculty, where he has revealed numerous vocations for music scholars. In the eighties he directed the music section of the DAIMON publisher, where he published biographies of Bach and Alessandro Scarlatti. And a collection of opera libretti with titles by Mozart, Domenico Cimarosa, Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi or Puccini.
In 1991 he founded the Ópera Actual magazine, which he directed until the year 2000. He also collaborated in the London Opera magazine. He published a comprehensive Dictionary of Opera (2007) in 2 volumes. He has made the edition and the preliminary study (2008) of the satirical poem in Catalan Gran Teatre del Liceu of c. 1850, manuscript from the Library of Catalonia. He has also translated operas into Catalan and has promoted the performance of some operas at the Teatro Principal in Barcelona (1999-2000).
He was an elected academician of the Royal Academy of Fine Letters in Barcelona, ??member of the Advisory Board of the Liceu Conservatory, honorary president of the Federation of Associations of Friends of the Opera of Catalonia and professor at the Sabadell Opera School .
“Roger Alier has been a scholar of the history of opera and, above all, of the anecdotes that this story has generated. He knew how to explain them with a unique talent,” says Joan Matabosch, artistic director of the Teatro Real. “He was a great communicator and a passionate disseminator of his knowledge. He has been an endearing character. All of us who have dealt with him have spent unforgettable moments with him.”
“Since the death of Xavier Montsaltvatge, I have not received news as sad as the death of the historian, journalist, critic and professor Roger Allier,” says Luís López Lamadrid, former artistic director of the Peralada Festival. The president of Festclásica and member of the board of the Cercle del Liceu considers that “an institution has died on us” and recalls that he just began to write reviews of it in La Vanguardia the same year the Peralada Festival was created. “Many of the operas he liked, others not so much, but he was never devastating.”
