Roger Alier, master

Nostalgia is one of the favorite sports of the Catalan tribe and today it is almost impossible for me to stop clinging to the past as if it were a wooden boat in the ocean or a portable pool. My teachers are dying; first Francesc Garriga, then Ricard Salvat... and now Alier. Thinking of Roger I travel to a classroom of the facu of Art History more than twenty years ago, Mondays and Tuesdays of the first semester, from eight to nine thirty. It was drastically polar cold (in Zona Universitaria, the UB had an infallible heating system, a powerful thermal power plant located in Physics that, by distributing air to the rest of the centers through pipes without any kind of insulation, gave us a blast of freezing air conditioning), Alier arrived swaying like a penguin without a flock, with a minister's suitcase overflowing with opera CDs and, in a few minutes, he already had everyone musically on fire.

Passion, enthusiasm. These are the two words that, surely, you will read in all the panegyrics that speak of Roger Alier. The media figure, as a critic in La Vanguardia and soul of the program Nit d'Arts (from when Canal 33 was the cultural reference of the country), will overshadow the profile of an academic who was one of the first musicologists to take an interest in the emergence of the operatic genre in our city. But of all this, his students will remember above all the educational passion of some university lessons that were worth their weight in gold. It has been said ad nauseam, but it is worth insisting: first, the encyclopedic memory of a man who harbored the course of sung theater in his head and narrated it with an unmistakable recitative and a histrionic jester's voice was surprising. Then, not a minor thing, the conviction that knowledge can only be transmitted to others by making use of that powerful sword called joy.

Roger Alier not only opened the way for the dissemination of opera in our country, being one of the fundamental pillars of this curious sect called liceístas. He also inoculated the love for music in his students and listeners with an oceanic tenacity. With Roger we always understood each other, because we thought that this romantic opera thing is a bit of a pain and people there shout too much. Alier was an 18th-century man; he loved Cimarosa, was a brother to Rossini, and adored Mozart. He believed, and in that he was absolutely right, that rococo theater had more grace than that of horned heroes because, fortunately, it was more similar to everything that happens to humans. But, whatever his aesthetic obsession, he told it with identical generosity. He was wary of scenic modernity, of course, but he justified it from a purist love for ancestral methodicalness.

Alier not only opened the way for the dissemination of opera in our country, being one of the fundamental pillars of this curious sect called liceístas 

Without you, magnificent, joyful master, nothing would have been the same. Today it's time to mourn you, dear panxut, hilarious companion of sounds. You already know that I will miss you. We will continue working. One hundredth of what you worked for it, that's for sure.