With the death of Marcel Cervelló, another reference for an entire generation of musical critics of operatic Barcelona in the second half of the 20th century disappears.
Like the now deceased masters Pau Nadal or Roger Alier, Marcel Cervelló was a faithful chronicler of the seasons of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, which he attended from the late 1940s until the beginning of 2024.
His last review was that of the alternative cast of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, last February, a review that can be retrieved from the website of Ópera Actual, a magazine of whose Honor Committee he was vice president and with which he collaborated since its inception. founded in 1991.
Born in Barcelona in 1937, he led a double professional life: he graduated in law, became deputy director of the Generali insurance company, had three children and five grandchildren. And his passion for opera, to which he dedicated all the time he could, was the main stimulus of his biography.
Linked to Ópera Actual as one of its most faithful and fertile editors, Cervelló signed a book about the Liceu, co-written with Pau Nadal, entitled El gran teatre del Liceu (1999). It was published in Catalan by Columna, within its Terra Nostra series.
A prolific columnist, he wrote countless programs by hand, mainly for the aforementioned lyrical coliseum in Barcelona or the season of the Friends of the Opera in Sabadell, currently Fundación Òpera in Catalunya.
He was also a member of the regular collaborators of the Radio 4 program Gran Gala, presented by Joan Lluch and which was on the air for forty years, from 1969 to 2009. It was the oldest program on radio broadcasting in Catalan and the only Radio 4 Ondas Award.
Along with Cervelló, other specialists such as the speech therapist Dr. Colomer Pujol, Pau Nadal, or the current maestro suggeritore –prompter– of the Liceu, Jaume Tribó, contributed enormously to the dissemination of the opera from this radio program and in Catalan.
His countless criticisms, scholarly articles, with explicit knowledge and explanation of the instrument of the human voice, of which he was a great expert and connaisseur, in addition to his writing always riddled with a fine and elegant irony and a very characteristic sense of humor, They have educated and served as a reference to countless lovers of the lyrical art of singing.
He was also a critic for the defunct magazine Montsalvat, and was the Barcelona correspondent for the Italian Opera magazine.
His latest collaboration, an article about the legendary Italian tenor Carlo Bergonzi, is pending publication in the next issue of Ópera Actual.
Marcel Cervelló died due to complications caused by pneumonia in the early hours of May 9.
