Private music tour in Barcelona with an official guide

The starting point is not random: the arch, built in 1888 by Josep Vilaseca i Casanovas as the main entrance to the Universal Exposition, was also the stage for the first major gatherings of Catalan choral singers. The 19th-century choral movement — the musical Renaixença — has one of its foundational moments here: thousands of singers gathered before a red-brick arch that Barcelona built in four years to show the world that it was a modern city. The guide contextualizes this moment and explains why choral music was politically inseparable from cultural Catalanism.

The most important Modernisme building after the Sagrada Família and the only one in the city that Domènech i Montaner conceived as a concert hall from the ground up. The Societat Coral Orfeó Català commissioned it in 1904 to replace the hall on Carrer Jonqueres where the Orfeó had performed since its founding in 1891. In two years and eight months of construction — between 1905 and 1908 — Domènech designed a hall with no interior columns, featuring an inverted stained-glass dome of 2,000 colored pieces, a stage framed by the muses of Catalan folk music on the left and those of universal classical music on the right, and an exterior facade where the ceramic Modernisme of Lluís Bru and Mario Maragliano reaches its highest density. The guide tours the exterior facade and explains the complete iconography — the bust of Beethoven, els orfeonistes, the frieze of the sixteen muses — with the level of detail that only a private tour allows.

One of the narrowest and best-preserved streets in the medieval quarter. From the 16th century, it was home to printers and booksellers; in the 19th, to the cafés and literary and musical salons where Barcelona’s bourgeoisie debated Italian opera versus Spanish zarzuela, Verdi versus Barbieri. The guide reconstructs this controversy that culturally divided Barcelona’s society for decades and which has a specific setting here.

For more than a century, Barcelona’s most famous promenade was the hub of the city’s musical life: cafés with orchestras, libretto sellers, and opera lovers discussing sopranos and tenors as they strolled. At the center of the route, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, inaugurated in 1847, was from its opening the second-largest opera house in Europe by capacity — 3,500 seats — and the most important in the Iberian Peninsula throughout the second half of the 19th century. The guide explains the fire of 1861, the reconstruction within two years, the anarchist attack of 1893 — a bomb thrown from the upper gallery during a performance of William Tell that killed 20 people — and the second fire of 1994, which destroyed the stage and the stalls without affecting either the foyer or the boxes. Today’s Liceu is the reconstruction inaugurated in 1999.

The neighborhood located to the left of La Rambla was, during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the center of Barcelona’s urban popular music: cafés-chantants with flamenco, variety shows, and popular songs in venues that occupied the ground floors of residential buildings. The guide walks through the streets where the most famous venues were located and explains the coexistence — and the tension — between the classical music of the Liceu and the popular music of the Raval, separated by barely a hundred meters of La Rambla.

For almost half a century — from 1894 to 1939 — the avenue was the center of popular entertainment in Catalonia. The name comes from its exact alignment with the 41° 22′ north latitude parallel. Along its route, more than forty theaters, cabarets, café-concerts, and variety halls coexisted at the same time: the Teatre Arnau, the Teatre Apol·lo, the Edén Concert, the Teatre Victòria, the Molino. The guide reconstructs the atmosphere of that avenue — cuplés, bohemian nights, artists like Raquel Meller and La Bella Dorita — and explains why the Franco regime progressively left it empty from 1939 onwards, and why some of those venues, like the Teatre Apol·lo, are still standing.