Palau de la Música Catalana, Barcelona

Our stay in Madrid was only three days – just long enough for the graduation and the saint’s day – and then we hopped the train to Barcelona. The friends we were traveling with had lived in Barcelona for many years: they had, in fact, met and married there, so touring the city was also a tour of their romantic past. It was so sweet! It also meant it took us a lot longer to reach a given Metro station because we kept taking short detours to see their favorite landmarks; for example, the steps where Ferdinand and Isabella greeted Columbus upon his return, or the church where our friends were married. When the youngest members of the party needed a bathroom, our guides had the brilliant idea to use the ones at the Palau de la Música. We hadn’t planned on visiting the Palau until Sunday, when we had tickets to a flamenco show there, but I’m so glad Augusto took us in daylight, too. Quite an elegant place for a bathroom break!

One of the original ticket windows (there’s a lovely, modern addition at the rear of the building with larger ticket facilities.)

The Palau de la Musica is a World Heritage site (No.804), which distinction it thoroughly deserves. It was designed by the Art Nouveau architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, a contemporary of the better-known-outside-Catalonia Antoni Gaudí. The theater was completed in 1908. That’s all the history I’m going to give right now, but if you’re curious, the World Heritage entry  has tons of detail. I’m just going to show you details!

The front façade is just about impossible to photograph – not without a severely professional wide-angle lens – because it faces a narrow street. You can only move about 15 feet away from the building, so it’s hard to take in as a whole. But good lord, the details on it – every square inch is decorated! Mosaics, majolica flowers, cast concrete flowers (or maybe they’re carved stone), patterned brick … You’ll see in the night-time photos that those bannisters behind the bust are emerald-green stained glass. Like this (except these are inside the building):

Here are a sampling of the wonders:

We did attend a flamenco performance here later in the week, and I turned my ISO up to 6400 (!) to get some shots of the moodily-lit interior. This is the stage, which I gather is designed for choral performance. The row of chairs were used by the flamenco musicians and singers, and that black mat is where the dancers performed. Look carefully at the back wall – the curved wall is decorated with sculptural busts of the Muses, which emerge from two-dimensional mosaic bodies. I’m afraid the lighting is too harsh to convey the effect, which was very cool.

More muses in the stained glass ceiling:

And wild Pegasi going berserk at the corners of the balcony:

Asymmetrical chandeliers encircling columns topped with majolica and mosaic peacock feathers:

And here’s the façade again (look for the stained glass balusters):

I’ll leave you with one last image showing the unbelievable attention to detail here:

In this one photo, there are stained glass, wrought iron, glazed brick, majolica, plaster, and ordinary brick laid on a curve. Mind blown.