Since I live in Ciutat Vella, well guarded by the statuette of our authentic patron saint (namely, the beautiful pubescent Eulalia), when I walk and smoke around my house, I like to converse with the fountain and the emaciated wall of Sant Felip Neri. I would like to enter the church more often but, as also happens with the little chapel of Sant Sever (which has re-emerged thanks to a fantastic restoration, I would say funded by some city paganino), most Barcelona temples are expressly closed so that not even Christ the King can enter. When I get bored inside the house, I also spy on the rectory of Sant Felip while drooling over my little cigars half-hidden behind the window; when we arrived at this place, five years ago now, the facade was a dark, lifeless wall... until one night we were surprised by the silhouette of an intriguing felipó whom we baptized as Quasimodo. Very soon, a group of sumptuous-bodied seminarians who also enjoyed watching us joined in.
Apart from sharing soliloquies and spying on it, I have had a primarily musical relationship with the church of Sant Felip Neri. Centuries ago, for example, our eminent musician from Lleida, Carles Trepat, used to play here, struggling as best he could to fill the entire nave of the church with sound with his wonderful Torres guitar. Now they give some supposedly baroque concerts, I would say of rather dubious quality. But history seems to be changing very soon, because the church once again has a first-division baroque organ, and it is an instrument with its own name; that of our Montserrat Torrent. This past Monday I attended its presentation party (I had already been able to hear it before, because my dear Núria Llorach knows that I find it quite amusing to access forbidden pleasures earlier than I should), a presentation that was also a tribute to a great lady of our music, still active at a very well-preserved hundred tacos, and she will fulfill more!
Now we can say that, without Montserrat Torrent's tenacity (and the money she has collected and given away herself), Barcelona would not have this magnificent instrument manufactured by Albert Blancafort, a beautiful machine of sounds that her father Gabriel had already begun to weave. Mrs. Torrent wanted to inaugurate it herself, of course, and it made perfect sense that the instrument's baptismal piece was a Tiento by her beloved Francisco Correa de Arauxo, the Sevillian composer whom our illustrious Barcelonian resurrected from almost absolute oblivion. Montserrat Torrent is a woman of oceanic generosity, and that is how she celebrated this party, surrounded by friends-students who offered a rather curious tasting of organ literature (in this Punyalada I do not act as a music critic, but suffice it to say that Juan de la Rubia demonstrated why he is Torrent's authentic heir; a true artist!).
It makes a lot of sense that the celebration of this new organ closed with a beautiful and energetic Battaglia by the German Johann Kaspar von Kerll, which Torrent devoured with still astonishing ease. Because this organ of Sant Felip Neri has been her personal and untransferable battle (the project of endowing Barcelona with a baroque instrument with mechanical transmission dated back to the late sixties!), and that is why its birth represents an act of vital affirmation and stubbornness that we will only appreciate with time. It was a great joy to see the city's music-loving public on their feet, applauding their illustrious fellow citizen! We were so happy to have met each other that we even recovered from Narcís Comadira's dreadful poems, painfully boxed between the concert repertoire (it must be said that they were recited by my dear Pere Arquillué, who with his vocal power can make even a pharmaceutical recipe sound beautiful).
As the reader will imagine, whenever something is inaugurated... our politicians rush to embrace the celebration to show off their faces. I will not comment on excessive aspects of the speeches of our mayor and president, because the laughter from the audience while the two spoke was illustrative enough as a symptom of our present. I will only state that I agree with an idea expressed by the current Molt Honorable, according to which it is pertinent that ---even while being concerned with technological innovation--- a country reclaims its roots, its tradition... and interpreters like Montserrat Torrent, who is a very much alive heritage of the nation. Absolutely right, president, but a country should also start thinking about how it is that one of its best interpreters, of European fame, has taken more than fifty years to make the dream of inaugurating an instrument a reality, which, evidently, is very costly, but is worth much less than so many absurdities that the citizenry pays for with surprising meekness...
But all this is superfluous, because what is important here is to remember that Montserrat Torrent has achieved it. We have an organ, an organ named Montserrat Torrent. No matter how much the Spanish or the fascists riddle Sant Felip Neri with holes again, it will be ours forever. So, let it never stop playing.