Music plays a certain part in my childhood memories of El
Canadell.
At the time, the instrument considered most effective at
getting people to dance, and the most widely used one, was the barrel organ. But
this contraption and its metallic and rustic notes didn’t imprint themselves on
my memory: they have left in my nose the unpleasant smell of the gas lamps that
lit outdoor dances.
All the same, in El Canadell there was something of good
quality: the Genover family’s piano. It was played by the two older siblings of
the family—usually with four hands: Maria and Xicu. On very still days—in the
terrible morning sun or at sunset, in the gentle half-light—you could hear the
piano from a long way away, and in El Canadell a kind of abeyance was
occasioned: the people who were going by the Genover place automatically tended
to start walking on tiptoe.
Maria and Xicu would sit at the piano. Seen from afar—they
played in a ground-floor parlor that had a big window facing the street—they
looked like two automatons. They played stiffly and as if corseted. They were
fans of select music. Maria, in addition to the playing piano, sang vaporous,
sentimental ballads. Xicu, with the practice book in front of him, never tired
of doing finger exercises. Cheap music is usually enjoyable, and it’s surely
for that reason that those who cultivate it tend to make too great a show of
it. Those who play select music are more closed to things, more difficult, and
fussier. But Xicu and Maria—or Maria and Xicu—didn’t need as much persuading as
corresponded to the notes they played. When an acquaintance came up to them
with a friendly and pleasant look and said to them, “Oh, Xicu (or Maria), play
the Rhapsody! It’s so pretty,” you contemplated the reassuring sight of seeing
them—no matter how little free time they had—go over to the piano, sit down in
front of the keys, open the music book, and play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Before beginning, they looked at each
other to confirm their cooperation in the performance: a serious look that
turned into a weighty smile. Complete silence fell over the parlor. Everyone
was concentrating. Everyone was making that face of feigned suffering that
people are in the habit of making before refined music. And from the piano, with
a brilliance slightly diminished by petty-bourgeois taste, came Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.
This piece was quite the undertaking. It was hard to play. The
furious parts gave the people—so they said—gooseflesh. But in the more
contemplative moments—which perhaps coincided with an audience of greater
refinement, an audience that made faces of solemnity rather than of
suffering—there was another great piece: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. If the Rhapsody
was a work for fingers and vigor, the Moonlight
Sonata was a piece for feeling. Together they made a complete musical microcosmos.
In this way, I, as a teenager in El Canadell, found myself
literally saturated with the Rhapsody
and the Moonlight Sonata. And there’s
nothing to be done about it now: this is the select music that will waft in my
memory of those days for the rest of my life. It’s the music that will bind me
to El Canadell for as long as I live—as I am bound to it by a distinctive
smell, very sweet, of rice powders and patchouli, a taste for roast mullet with
oil and vinegar, the novels of Paul Bourget, and the form—barely glimpsed—of the calves of a
few hazy, indistinct young ladies of the time.
--Josep Pla, El quadern gris
