It is on its way to being the saddest story in the annals of musical Barcelona. From number 18 on Avenida Tibidabo, that is, from the old Sala Granados that in 1911 the doctor and patron Salvador Andreu had built so that the famous pianist could have an auditorium where the musical life in the city could continue to manifest itself, no longer more than the side walls and the facade, propped up and fragile in appearance, remain. The rest is history.
The two basements, of 300 m2 each, have also been demolished without the Generalitat or the City Council having considered the possibility of acquiring the property to maintain it as a concert hall and other cultural uses. Because, among other things, the acoustics were excellent, as La Vanguardia testified a century ago.
What does the municipality have to say about the state of a property that hid a valuable treasure for the city’s memory?
“It was not a protected building. The developer who acquired it once demolished it. It is currently being enabled for private use”.
This is how poor the response of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) is in this new mandate. The previous ones also made it clear that it was not “among the City Council’s plans to buy it” to guarantee its cultural use, no matter how much of a Salvem la Sala Granados platform that had been set up.
Protected or not, the property was acquired in 2017, according to the Land Registry, by an aesthetic doctor. It is a property that, as can be read in the Metropolitan General Plan, does not allow the use of housing, but other cultural, educational, sports, administrative and… health uses. The doctor, however, has declined to attend to this newspaper and to make known his plans for the location that was originally intended for the Catalan genius of music.
The farm is contemporary with its emblematic Goyescas. Granados had a study there that overlooked the back garden and hosted important European musicians in his room, such as his friend and great figure of the piano Édouard Risler or the violinist Jacques Thibaud. It will not have a great architectural value, but it is, however, included in the catalog of architectural heritage within the whole of Avenida Tibidabo, with a level of protection C. This means that it must fit into the landscape and respect the environmental conditions and integration into the sector where it is located.
In fact, Avinguda del Tibidabo is the backbone of the urbanization that occupied the old Frare Blanc estate. And it was carried out on the central slopes of the Collserola massif by the Societat Anónima del Tibidabo and under the initiative of Dr. Andreu himself, also a pharmacist. It was a summer urbanization that stretched like a linear garden city. And to save the unevenness of the slope, a tram ran along the axis, flanked by large sidewalks with trees, the Tramvia Blau, also designed by the influential doctor Andreu, as well as the funicular that went up to the top of the Sagrad Cor of Tibidabo. It was inaugurated in 1901 and the constructions mainly followed the prevailing modernism during these decades at the beginning of the century, although not all of them bore the signature of great architects such as Puig and Cadafalch, who built the spectacular Casa Muntades.
Enric Granados (Lleida, 1867, Manega channel, 1916) developed his projects in this now “unprotected” auditorium, which keeps his Greek muses on the facade. It was for several years from 1912, the year in which the bourgeoisie went there to inaugurate it. One of the composer’s first actions was to launch a patronage project to build a monument to Isaac Albéniz, with whom he had consolidated a great friendship during his Parisian years… In 1915, Granados moved with his wife in New York for the world premiere of the operatic version of Goyescas, a commission that came from Jacques Rouché, the manager of the Paris Opera, but which the Great War prevented from seeing the light of day in the French capital. The success was deafening. Granados was received at the White House. And having missed the liner on his way home, in March 1916, he sailed to Great Britain and took the Sussex bound for France… And his tragic end is well known, when the ship was torpedoed by a German submarine.
A note: the Goyescas opera would still take some time to premiere in Spain, as the critic Jorge de Persia well remembers; it would not be until he programmed it, in the summer of 1939, the first Donostia Musical Fortnight, and shortly after the Liceu, upon its reopening after the Civil War, with Franco…
The Granados auditorium was used as a concert hall until the late twenties, when Dr. Andreu died. Manuel de Falla was there. Then, in 1933, the Voz de España occupied it as a dubbing studio, a use that lasted until 2009, when the outdated rental contract was revised. The building began to deteriorate since that same year it was abandoned by this dubbing company, which leased it.
There was even a project to keep it as a concert hall for the city, in addition to making it a museum space, so that the Granados archive, which is mostly in the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Museu de la Música de Barcelona, ??was present in an audiovisual way… Now we must hope that at least an aesthetic recovery of the facade will take place.
