Palau de la Música Catalana

Palace · Sant Pere (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona, Spain

The Palau de la Música Catalana was squeezed onto a plot so tight that nobody could stand back and look at it, so Lluís Domènech i Montaner put the whole display inside. He built it between 1905 and 1908 for the Orfeó Català, a choral society of amateur singers who commissioned the hall for themselves. An iron frame carries the weight, so the outer walls no longer had to hold anything up: they became curtains of coloured glass, and the auditorium was designed to be lit by daylight alone. Inside, the ceiling comes down to meet you: an inverted bell of stained glass with a sun at its centre, ringed by women's faces. Behind the stage, eighteen muses emerge from the wall, flat mosaic below the waist and full sculpture above. Every surface is decorated: rosettes cover the ceilings, mosaic runs up the columns, and because the side walls are glass as well, daylight reaches you from three directions at once. It is still a working hall rather than a museum: the Orfeó sings here alongside symphony, flamenco and jazz, and UNESCO added the building to the World Heritage list in 1997.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Height changes the room — from the stalls the skylight is a dome overhead; from the upper tiers you sit nearer the glass side walls and almost level with the tiled capitals.
The organ is not scenery — the pipes above the stage belong to a working instrument, restored in the 2000s and still played, sometimes from a console wheeled out onto the stage.
Listen as well as look — hard surfaces and glass make the room bright and immediate, which suits massed voices more than a big orchestra. Opinion on its acoustics has always divided.
Expose for the glass — the skylight is far brighter than the room beneath it, so a camera left to itself turns the sun white and the muses into black shapes.

Things to do

1
Watch the ceiling instead of the stage
Sit in the middle of the stalls at a daytime concert and, for the first few minutes, keep your eyes up rather than on the players. The glass sun hangs directly over you, and its colour keeps shifting as cloud crosses the city — something no lamp in the room can do.
2
Read the stage arch left to right
Stand near the front of the stalls before the hall fills and read the proscenium from one side to the other. On the left, Anselm Clavé stands under a tree with a chorus of villagers gathered round him; on the right, a bust of Beethoven sits below the Valkyries charging out of the stone.
3
Walk the mosaic colonnade
Go up to the first-floor foyer and follow the row of columns along the street windows, checking each one as you pass: the tilework changes pattern column by column, none of it repeating. Then step to one end and look down the whole row at once, so the patterns stack into each other.
4
Circle it from below
Walk both narrow streets outside, slowly, all the way round. Find the sculptural group boiling off the corner, the composers' busts set high on the front, and the tiled columns beside the old ticket windows. Keep your chin raised the whole way — almost nothing worth finding here sits at eye level.