On the balcony of his house, in the family home on Gran de Gràcia street, David Bagué built a violin. He was twelve years old. He had taken as a model a violin his father had bought in case any of his three children wanted to learn to play it. Music and painting were alive in that house, where his mother played the piano and often received visits from an opera singer, while his father dedicated his free time to drawing. In that atmosphere of such artistic sensibility, David, the youngest of the siblings, disassembled the violin his father had bought. He took it apart, and felt "a child inside a wooden cathedral."
He was a child with dyslexia and ADHD and wore leg braces; he couldn't play with his schoolmates in the playground. However, he was a creature with an adult solemnity, "when I saw that violin from the inside, I knew I would dedicate myself to making violins." He told his parents and remembers their reaction perfectly: "We will help you, they told me. And I won't have enough life to thank them for letting their son do what he wanted to be."
It was 1977, and that child's game gradually became his life, a life that has unfolded among carpentry and cabinetmaking tools on the ground floor of his house, in the Gràcia neighborhood. It is a place where he keeps the essence and all the truth of instruments made conscientiously. With the same attitude as that twelve-year-old child, violins born from his hands have carried the Barcelona brand very high, sounding in the hands of internationally renowned musicians such as the Greek violinist ---and probably one of the best violinists in the world, according to Bagué--- Leonidas Kavakos, or the American Ruggiero Ricci.
"I have always made violins for myself, dedicated to others. It is very exciting to be part of a musician's life. We believe in each other out of love and sincerity. Building instruments means this." That one of the first violins of the Vienna Philharmonic has played a violin made by him in the famous New Year's concert is the icing on the cake in the brilliant career of that child who found the complicity of his parents. Bagué says that "there are two important days in life: the day we are born and the day you know what you want to be."
He also considers himself lucky to have been born in the Gràcia neighborhood, the bohemian Gràcia that is now nothing like it was when he was a child, with so many artisan workshops, but which still ---he affirms--- lives off the residue of what it once was. "You would leave school and smell the wood and varnish from a workshop where they made saints," he recalls. Today he still has a piano maker very close to where he makes his violins.
The art that feeds the soul
Every piece this luthier creates is unique. "Craftsmanship is a medium. The instrument is for making music that moves, it is food for the soul. Art serves for that, to feed the soul. Here I make a piece with a magnetism that will transcend itself because it will go to an interpreter. The instrument is charged with human essence."
Every morning, in his workspace, on Virtut street, he faces the main material: wood that ---he says--- behaves like a map of life. "The grains are the marks that life has left on the tree." Every expression of David Bagué exudes consciousness and calls for reflection.
"You can live superficially, strategically, or deeply. And I have always tried to live deeply. I try to maintain a 19th-century spirit"He has been embracing something more than a trade for almost fifty years, a way of doing, of perseverance, a vital journey, a tradethat ---he knows--- came to find him, already very young. And from that child, there still remains in him "this restlessness of waiting for the next day, waiting for the night of Three Kings, the illusion of the gift of life. And so you have already gained a lot as a human."
Tools within reach on his work tables, like the entire space where David still spends so many hours creating string instruments, mainly violins, have never left an era. "This vintage is real," he specifies. He knows that many people sign up for the glamour of certain ways of doing things like before. But his romantic way of living and working, he carries it in his DNA. "You can live superficially, strategically, or deeply. And I have always tried to live deeply. I try to maintain a 19th-century spirit," he clarifies.
Classical music envelops the atmosphere in which he operates and in which his violins come into the world. "It's been thirty-five years since the radio dial hasn't moved," points out the instrument craftsman, surrounded by violins and photographs of memories that speak of all these years preparing the path of music.
"I have tried to make the most artistic version of my craft. I am a militant of my work"He also considers his space and workshop his sanatorium, because at 30 years old, doctors gave him a year to live, but he has just turned 60, knocking on wood every morning and every afternoon, while shaping his next violin. "I have tried to make the most artistic version of my craft. I am a militant of my work. This can sometimes be confused with arrogance, but you have to believe in what you do," he declares.And he believes it, he believes, above all, in his personal imprint, in the depth of field in each instrument he makes."Luthiers better than me exist, but there is none like me, with my virtues and my flaws. And this is what makes each piece I make unique, and gives it the humanity that musicians see and notice."
How has the world of music and musicians changed, however, since he started? "From when I was a child to now, the musical world is incomparable, now there is incredible quality in everything, but the romanticism of before is no longer there," he comments. At 17, his parents sent him to Cremona, southeast of Milan. There, a Dutch master ordered the chaos of that child and gave him the technical part. Afterwards, and until today, through trial and error, he has been enriching his way of doing things.
The social violins
He had always worked solely by commission, until, during the pandemic, he considered that, as a craftsman he feels he is, he had to express his social conscience as part of his trade. And he launched the Alta Cultura Social project which, simply and plainly, means that he started making prêt-à-porter violins for the young musicians of the future.
Belonging to a working-class family, but with a great artistic sense, has led him to start a new line of work, creating quality instruments, but more accessible to those who are starting out. This has meant that, from seeing his instruments only in the main concert halls of the world, they have also begun to be seen in the main schools and conservatories that welcome the talents of the future. "It's a way of sponsoring, you become a patron with pieces that are more accessible," he says. And he explains: "They are instruments with different finishes, lighter and adapted, with less complication, thinking, monetarily, of a younger audience." And he justifies the name Alta Cultura Social. "Good quality must reach everyone. The Berlin Philharmonic, for example, is a cooperative, but of a high level. Beauty is always good."
David Bagué continues to make, anyway, instruments for those who have more possibilities. Those of the Cosmos and Casals quartets have been made by him. Now he feels the illusion of being able to soon see in Barcelona a string orchestra in which all the instruments are made by him. It would be another great conquest of the intuitive and heterodox work of this Barcelona luthier convinced that "you can break the rules, once you know them."
Thirty years of summering in Pollença, where the Classical Music Festival is held, have allowed him to combine leisure and his scarce disconnection from his workspace with that musical nexus that permeates his life since, on a balcony in Gràcia, as a child, he made his first violin, which he still keeps today, "a violin full of sincerity and perspective," he concludes.