SCHOLA CANTORUM TOUR TO BARCELONA 2007
It is a bleary dawn on Thursday morning in the February half-term when forty-six choristers and six members of staff assemble at Heathrow. The boys are full of excitement and bounce, some of the staff noticeably less so, but the sense of an adventure about to begin makes the tedium of airport check-in and security seem shorter and more bearable than the two hours it takes. Soon we are winging our way to Barcelona, the short flight culminating in a steep descent as soon as we have crossed the Pyrenees whose snowy peaks shimmer majestically in the sun. Barcelona airport is smart and modern and shares the steel and glass homogeneity of airports worldwide. It is the warm air outside and the deep, lustrous blue of the Mediterranean sky above the palm trees which proclaim its particular foreignness. It is mid –afternoon by the time we arrive at the hotel and unpack. We are lodged in a suburb, beneath the shadow of the Tibidabo church high on a hill, its name derived from Lenten Gospel in which Satan takes Our Lord up a high mountain and tells Jesus he will give him all the kingdoms below in return for worshipping him. There is apparently a Tibidabo theme park, presumably intended to clinch the temptation, but sadly it is closed at this time of year.
We head for our first trip on the city’s excellent, cheap metro system. We will ride the underground dozens of times over the next few days, and I quickly re-learn the obsessive counting which is part of school trips, so as not to loose any of the group assigned to my care as we change trains or muster at a station, and I also rediscover the pleasure of the easy conversation you get into as you walk along with your group or wait at the station.
Arrived in the centre of town, we begin by walking the long, broad avenue of Las Ramblas which leads to the sea front. It is lined with smart shops and market stalls most of which seem to sell birds and animals, cheerfully in defiance of EU regulations, judging by the look of them, but curiously memorable and atmospheric and fascinating to the younger boys especially. Finding a table for 51 on a budget tends to restrict the amount of bon viveuring you can do on a Schola trip. Expediency requires us to opt for a pizza supper. I am always amazed at how it is possible for staff on these trips to sit and eat supper. My experience of school trips elsewhere always included “mind the gap” type mantras reminding the children to shout less, sit still, stop throwing things etc. Our boys simply sit and talk for nearly two hours by the time everyone is served. By now one has a curious feeling of having been away from England for days, not hours.
On our return we discover that a group of Irish girls are also staying in “our” hotel. Called me old-fashioned, but they are nothing if not forward, hanging out of their rooms and cruising the corridors and introducing themselves as soon as they see the boys arriving. I am reminded of that wonderful film “The Happiest Days of Your Life,” in which a boys’ school has a girls’ school billeted on them during the war.
Next morning we visit the city’s aquarium, the largest in Europe. In includes a huge shark tank though which you glide on a travelator set in a glass tunnel... The effect is really rather disconcerting. As ever with school trips, a cup of coffee and the need for a sit down whilst the children are safe and gainfully occupied seems more pressing than another look at the tropical fish, magnificent though they undoubtedly are.
The first musical duty of the tour is a concert in Barcelona Cathedral early this evening, so in the afternoon we make our way back to the old town and the cathedral. The facade of the cathedral is covered in one of those trompe l’oeil-type tarpaulins common on continental reconstruction projects. A life size picture of the building is painted on the sheets which cover the renovations. It is like a vast stage-set; lit up at night you might almost be taken in by the deception, but for the word Samsung emblazoned across the mock portico. Whilst the Schola rehearses inside I explore the flamboyant gothic cloisters, which fortunately, are not under wraps and as well as several beautiful chapels with magnificent wrought ironwork, they enclose a garden of palms and orange trees, roamed by the famous white geese which have apparently been a feature of the place since its foundation. Some say they are there in imitation of the geese who used to be kept on Rome Capitol, others say they functioned like watch dogs; they are certainly loud enough to deter intruders. The concert begins at six and is well-attended. The boys sing, inter alia, Mendelssohn’s Lauda Sion, by now one of their party pieces, and a beautiful eight-part Ave Verum by Colin Mawby, a difficult piece of contrasting moods and tonality which ends with great serenity. The Schola stands above a confessio at the end of the magnificent carved choir stalls filling the cathedral with beautiful sounds. Afterwards we enjoy what is perhaps the most memorable meal of the tour, dining al fresco at a restaurant in the cathedral square. Mr Harris solves the dilemma of which of your favourite tapas to order by simply ordering one of everything on the menu.
Saturday morning is wet and grey but fortunately there is less walking today. A coach takes us to the Nou Camp stadium, home of Barcelona’s football club. This is apparently the largest stadium in Europe seating 120,000 comfortably – comfortably for a stadium that is... It boasts a shop selling an amazing variety of souvenirs in Barcelona team strip colours. There is even a Barcelona fridge, for the really devoted fan. I buy a Barcelona umbrella, in homage, it must be said, to the weather’s prospects, rather than the club.
We journey next to the church of the Sagrada Familia, the huge church designed by Gaudi and still under construction. The conception and scale of the project are breathtaking and the exterior sculptures are very powerful. It is harder to get a feel for the interior which is still full of scaffolding except for part of two transepts. Interestingly enough the boys generally are not enthusiastic about it as a sacred space. I know what they mean, there seems to me that there is an element of self-mockery in the modernism of Gaudi, as though he is caricaturing the styles he imitates.
On Sunday morning the boys give a second concert in the morning at a church in a coastal town called Callela, about an hour’s drive from the city: Mendelssohn’s Lauda Sion, the Allegri Miserere and twentieth century motets are on the programme in a parish church which has been all but ruined by a barbaric re-ordering. It also has a cavernous acoustic and a less than inspiring electronic organ. I finally get the chance to shine when Mr Evans, the world’s least flappable organist, discovers that the pedal bottom D isn’t sounding, so I play it one fingered on the manual for about forty bars continuously in Balfour Gardiner’s “Te Lucis Ante Terminum.”
We return to the city to visit the Parc Guell with its Gaudi sculptures and then we visit the Zoo. After a great deal of walking and some of the inevitable loitering involved in school trips, we come in the evening back into the old city and to the church of Santa Maria del Mar. This magnificent gothic church was begun in 1329 on the site of a much earlier church and completed in less than sixty years, an astonishing feat when one looks at its huge proportions. Its nave is broad – some forty-five feet wide and the vaults with their magnificently decorated keystones, each weighing something like 6 tons, tower more than a hundred feet high. There is a spare quality to the building – the octagonal pillars are undecorated, and the horrors of the civil war robbed the church of many decorations and side altars, though some magnificent stained class survives in the ox-eye and rose windows. If architecture truly is frozen music, then this is Allegri’s Miserere in stone – a soaring, sparse kind of a prayer which seems to defy the gravity and ugliness of sin and stretch up to God’s mercy.
Here in the Blessed Sacrament chapel separate from the rest of the church I celebrate Mass for the group. It has been a long day, the boys are tired and far from home and as so often happens in this situation a remarkable peace and devotion descends on the chapel for Mass as the myriad thoughts and experiences and joys and sorrows there are joined into one offering by the Holy Spirit. At the end the group remains totally still and silent – they are still like this when I come out of the sacristy a few minutes later as though no one wants to disturb this mood. Unbroken for several minutes, we finally fill the silence with the gentle Salve Regina for Our Lady, Star of the Sea.
Montserrat or “jagged mountain” rises 4,000 feet above the plain and is topped by strange shaped crags which loom over the Benedictine abbey built on a ledge below the summit. The situation is breathtaking, the monastery appears like some kind of fairy castle set above the clouds. No wonder that Montserrat was associated with the Grail legends. Wagner’s Parsifal includes references to the “castle of Montsalvat in the Pyrenees.” Another legend says that the Moreneta, the black Madonna, was carved by St Luke and brought here by St Peter. Historians can certainly trace devotion to Our Lady of Montserrat back to the 9th Century when there was a chapel on the mountain. The first monastery was built in the 11th Century and the present small Romanesque statue dates from the 12th Century. For centuries then, the mountain has been a place of prayer and pilgrimage. The soldier Ignatius of Loyola came here after recovering from his wounds, spent three days preparing for a general confession and hung his dagger and his sword at Our Lady’s Shrine before watching the night there. He departed on the feast of the Annunciation 1522 for nearby Manresa, where he was to spend months of solitude and prayer and wrote the Spiritual Exercises. To the mountain shrine of Our Lady of Montserrat we have come on the final day of our short tour. The abbey itself boasts one of the oldest boys’ choirs in the world, the Escolania whose task it is to sing twice a day an antiphon in honour of the Virgin of Montserrat. Before the Escolania sings at 1pm, our boys are to sing for a few minutes, as it were to set the mood for the pilgrims.
The actual shrine of the Madonna is situated in a chapel which spans the apsidal end of the abbey like a bridge, so that a constant stream of pilgrims can climb up to the shrine and down the other side without disturbing the liturgy in the church. From the church the statue is just visible through an arch above the choir. La Moreneta has her back, as it were, to a small chapel and here I am able to celebrate Mass with a number of the boys and staff whilst we wait for our “slot.” “We have come to this mountain to honour the Mother of God, may we through her intercession come at last to Christ our Rock,” is the opening prayer of the proper of Our Lady of Montserrat. Mass over, it is time to rejoin the others in the abbey church below to sing.
Always on a Schola tour one piece or even one phrase from a piece becomes absolutely fixed in my head and haunts me throughout the tour and for days afterwards. Long before we had reached Montserrat I had the piece Nigra Sum sed Formosa, by Pablo Casals echoing round and round in my head. Casals wrote the piece for the Escolonia, and I know Charles Cole was worried that singing it there might seem like the musical equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle for a miners’ convention but the monk who welcomed us seemed to think it was no problem. I am tempted to think that if the Escolania had any cause to feel reproachful, it would not be for the Schola singing it, but for their singing it so very beautifully. It sets words from the Song of Songs, and listening to it you could guess it was written by a cellist. Its passionate phrases leap the octave and swoon gently down in an exquisite setting of the text: “Surge, surge, amica mea;” “Arise my beloved one, arise, for lo the winter is past and the time of the singing of the birds is come.”
At One the Escolania process into the choir in their blue cassocks and sleeveless white surplices. To make the occasion even more colourful the choir stalls are half-full of the Barcelona Football Club’s youth academy in red and blue tracksuits. They are apparently engaged in some kind of exchange programme with the Escolania, so the monk headmaster of the choir school tells me, but I am unable to satisfy my curiosity as to what exactly that might involve as it is time for the Escolania to begin. They sing two pieces and an antiphon to Our Lady in Catalan. Their sound is, I have to say, not as pure and fluting as our boys, it is a more robust, kind of sound which with the throaty Catalan vowel sounds has a power and depth all of its own and is very moving. The first piece they have music to sing from. The second piece is clearly something they sing from heart, for they tuck their music inside their surplices and then they pull their arms through the sleeve holes to tuck them under their surplices as well. It’s rather quaint, but also curiously moving, for they stand very still, like monks with their hands folded in prayer beneath their scapulars, and sing what is clearly an ancient hymn to Our Lady, as has been sung every day for centuries. The church is packed with pilgrims.
We leave the mountain by the cable car; a breathtaking and stomach-churning descent spanning a great chasm. The boys are in the highest of spirits, recalling great cable car moments from James Bond and “Where Eagles Dare.” The tour too, is in its final descent. A lingering last evening meal with speeches and well-deserved gifts and votes of thanks to Mr Cole and Mr Price, Mr Evans, Mr Harris and Miss Blumer whose Spanish and whose unstinting pastoral care have done so much to make it a happy trip. Tomorrow it’s back to wintry England and routine and Lent. But not without a series of very special memories captured on whatever part of the heart it is that reacts to the light of beautiful worship in music and stone, to the precise focus of excellence and the rich colours of all that is good and noble and authentic and beautiful and inspiring about this remarkable group of young people and those who dedicate themselves to forming them.