Beethoven-Albertí

While having a coffee, strolling through the Gòtic, or dining with Xavier Albertí, there comes a moment in the conversation when one feels tempted to pull out a notebook, compulsively take notes, and pray for the lesson to last a few more hours, regardless of whether Caravaggio, Guimerà, Pasolini, Sagarra, Lachenmann, or Cunillé appear in the imaginary arena of our Theatermacher. Our tribe, permanently out of focus, tends to define Xavier as a scholar or a sage, due to his unheard-of ability to have European culture in his head, to link quotes and names with a compulsive syntax... But that's not it, because the ingenuity of this universal Lloret native lies in the sagacity of making the weight of tradition travel to the Hegelian question of "who are we?" and, ultimately, to the Foucauldian question par excellence, "who are you?", that is, the ultimate question that makes us turn to the theater.

Xavier often says that the purpose of theatrical art is to renew our coexistence pacts; in other words, that the impulse to gather around a stage arises from the concern of asking ourselves why we are still together. All this comes to mind if we think of Beethoven, the conference-show that Albertí and his putative son Albert Arribas give us at Teatre La Fábrica (buy tickets quickly, the show ends on May 3!), a meeting that begins precisely by questioning why politics, through anthems and numerous festivities, has always tried to appropriate the composer from Bonn and, in turn, why his famous curls have reached auction prices higher than those of Michael Jackson. The concert is also a form of theater, and Albertí wonders why Beethoven continues to be the composer who, year after year, leads more people in the world to place their buttocks in an auditorium.

The answers are multiple and can be thought about during the ninety minutes of this wonderful meeting's bore: there is the composer who dialogues between light and shadows in the Pathétique, who knows how to intuit the beauty of dissonances (anticipating his Viennese colleagues, who would find in atonality the best translation of the ills of the Old Continent), and also the autonomous genius who ---in a way--- creates the figure of the freelance composer and the modern form of concert. There is also the revolutionary who, intentionally, places the interpreter (and the musical audience) before the stress of reading and interpreting music from the vertigo of emotions, through the imperative of playing almost everything Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung. Finally, it would only be missing, there is the enigma found in the quasimodo and misanthropic being, the mass agitator who sought revolution in the strictest solitude.

But all this, I insist, would be nothing more than knowledge acquired with effort... if Albertí did not have the gesture of uniting Beethoven with the particular universe of this imperative "who am I?" that leads us to the theater. Here the actor-creator of this piece finds meaning in the dignity of Beethovenian music and uses it to overcome the extensive but limited dialectic of the piano (friends of La Fábrica, buy a better rattle, the tuning of this instrument almost made me faint!) that goes beyond the score and becomes a scenic gesture. The actor-creator not only makes aesthetics, since behind Beethovenian independence (and his mysterious pathologies) he also finds the vindication of a free sexuality and a complex-free Catalan identity, placing the musician's eyes at the height of Clavé's and the muses of our Palau.

Travel to La Fábrica, because -besides listening to Beethoven- you will attend a first-rate theatrical exercise that forces us to ask ourselves where our small source of dignity is located, which forces you to question what your creative revolution is and which, finally, tells us that ---basically--- we go to the theater to escape normality and not stay at home as Diogenic beings. Albertí does all this, accompanied by Arribas, and with the spirit of Ludwig. It's no small thing. Take advantage of it, because lately Barcelona theater is becoming something highly tedious, propagandistic and overflowing with prefabricated answers. And to us, natürlich, what interests us are questions of a certain height.