Conxita Badia, the voice that the war, a world of men and oblivion silenced

PalmaOn the night of July 17, 1936, Conxita Badia was rehearsing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Palau de la Música Catalana under the direction of Pau Casals. The work was to inaugurate the People's Olympiad in Barcelona, conceived as a response to the Olympic Games that Nazi Germany was holding that summer in Berlin. During the rehearsal, news of the military uprising arrived. The concert would not take place. Before parting ways, Casals proposed that the musicians perform the final movement one more time, the song of fraternity built by Beethoven upon Schiller's Ode to Joy. They did not know when they would meet again.

That moment marked much more than the interruption of a concert: it was the rupture of a cultural and political project that had turned Barcelona into one of the European musical capitals. "It was the breaking of the entire dream that the Republic had represented," explains Mireia Domènech i Bonet, great-great-granddaughter of Badia and curator of the Conxita Badia Year. At the center of that effervescence was a woman who shared the stage with some of the most important musicians of her time, but whom history would end up relegating behind their names.

Ninety years after the beginning of the Civil War and a little over a year after the fiftieth anniversary of her death, Mallorca is listening to Conxita Badia again. Ca n'Alcover hosted a conversation this Thursday about the ties she wove with the island, while this Saturday, October 3, at 8 p.m., the Auditòrium de Palma will host a concert by the Sant Cugat Symphony Orchestra and the Orfeó Balear, conducted by Salvador Brotons. The first part will recover songs composed by Badia and now orchestrated by Brotons, in addition to works by Eduard Toldrà. In the second, that Ninth Symphony that the war left suspended will sound once again.

Badia had been the favorite performer of Enric Granados, Pau Casals, Manuel de Falla, Frederic Mompou, and Eduard Toldrà. "Within this world of great men, she is the woman and the voice for whom they write and who premieres the works," points out Domènech. But she was not only a soprano: she was also a pianist, composer, and a decisive teacher for the subsequent generation, with students such as Montserrat Caballé.

Her specialty was not operatic grandiloquence, but the lied, the song for voice and piano in which music and poetry advance together. “She was not a great opera diva. She did lyric, song, and she was a woman who loved poetry,” explains her great-great-granddaughter. This condition as a performer helps to understand the fragility of her memory: a performance exists while the voice sounds and, in an era when recordings were scarce, it can vanish without a trace.

Domènech speaks of a “triple silencing”: that of the woman placed in the shadow of the composers; that of the artist committed to the Republic and condemned to exile, and that of the performer whose work disappears when the concert ends. She herself grew up knowing Conxita Badia above all as her great-grandmother, who had spent seven years exiled in Argentina. It was during the research undertaken on the occasion of the Conxita Badia Year that she discovered the scope of her public figure and her commitment.

Badia participated in the actions for international dissemination of the republican cause and, according to Domènech, she was the only woman integrated into that external projection. The war expelled her from the country and dismantled the musical scene to which she belonged. When she returned, in December 1946, she did so to a radically different society. And the same sexism that had removed her from the narrative facilitated her return, because Francoism assumed that she would dedicate herself to domestic chores. The Mallorcan composer Baltasar Samper, exiled in Mexico, did not have that option.

The bond with Baltasar Samper

The relationship between Badia and Samper allows us to reconstruct their ties with Mallorca. Both were part of the same Barcelona musical scene. In May 1931, Badia sang at the presentation concert of the Group of Independent Composers of Catalonia, of which Samper was a member alongside Robert Gerhard, Frederic Mompou, and Manuel Blancafort. She performed a song by the Majorcan composer there.

The trace of their relationship also appears in Vespre de juny, a composition for voice and piano that Samper dedicated “to his friend Conxita Badia”. Although “we cannot determine to what extent they were close friends, they did share a context and maintained an important artistic and personal bond,” explains ethnomusicologist Amadeu Corbera, a specialist in the work of the Majorcan musician.

Both had studied with Enric Granados and it is possible that they coincided at his academy before 1910, although no documentary confirmation has been found. They also signed a welcome letter addressed to Arnold Schönberg when the composer arrived in Barcelona in 1931. Among the great names of a deeply masculinized universe, Badia was the only female signatory. “This shows that she was an important figure and that she was taken into account,” Corbera emphasizes.

After the exile, Badia visited Mallorca thanks to her family ties with the Bonets, who had a house in Llucalcari and also associated with Blai Bonet. On the island, she no longer found Samper, who was exiled in Mexico, and his activity had remained confined to more intimate circles. This Saturday's concert, with the Orfeó Balear, must repair that fracture.

For Domènech, the fact that the Ninth is now being played in Palma represents a “happy convergence of facts and characters” and also a gesture of gratitude to the Majorcan group, which in July 1936 had traveled to Barcelona to participate in the concert that the military uprising prevented.

The tribute also seeks to project her legacy into the future. The family promotes the Conxita Badia Competition for voice and piano duets, an initiative that gives prominence to poetry and composers in Catalan and that aspires to incorporate young talent from the Islands. “She was a great promoter of songs in Catalan throughout the world,” recalls Domènech, who claims the need to make this heritage sound again: “If the young people here do not sing Baltasar Samper, who will?”. Because, if they are not performed, he concludes, “the scores remain inside a book”.