Preface

Summary

Though written in the summer of 2010, this book has its roots in the summer of 1982 when, arriving almost by accident for a month of rest in a seaside town in the Province of Barcelona, I asked a hotel desk clerk why I was hearing not so much Spanish spoken around me, and why a great deal of what I was seeing didn't “look like Spain.” It was explained to me with patience — but the patience of the long-suffering — that I had arrived in a place called Catalonia, a place with its own history, culture, and — as I was to find most emphatically — language. The first person I met had a name that I had never heard before, Jaume, one that I was to find very common indeed. The second introduction was to a man called Gonçal, another new name for me. When, later, I was told that, under the dictatorship from which the Spanish territories were in many ways still emerging, Jaume had been forced to call himself Jaime and Gonçal, though named for his father, had to be Gonzalo, the seeds of a lasting curiosity about the details of this culture and its history, both millennial and recent, were sown.

Some of the coincidental details that I was immediately encountering were almost eerily prophetic of this book. Not only was I in Sitges, the historic center of the modernista movement to which Xavier Montsalvatge's family and all his teachers owed allegiance, but the very building in which I was to spend that month, and many months in succeeding years, was a villa that had been built by so-called indianos — part of the tide of Catalans who returned rich from Cuba and whose musical cargo, as will be seen, provided Montsalvatge with both inspiration and content for his remarkable oeuvre. Thus was I unknowingly being prepared by this nineteenth-century house, and many of those around it, for the major component of Montsalvatge's esthetic that was derived from the habanera catalana. In fact, a writer who spent his early years in that elegant villa, after his family turned it into a hotel, says that when he finally visited Havana the whole city seemed to him to be just the beloved Sitges house writ large.