Barcelona, 1883.

A bookseller named Josep Maria Bocabella had recently traveled to Italy, and wanted to build a church inspired by the Basilica della Santa Casa in Loreto. Work on El Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família had already begun the year before under the direction of the archtiect Francisco de Paula del Villar.

However, due to artistic and financial disagreements between him and the overseers of the project, del Villar resigned. This left the director, Joan Martorell (himself an architect) to find a replacement. He knew exactly the person to call on: his understudy.

His name was Antoni Gaudí i Cornet. He was born in Reus, near Tarragona in southern Catalonia, a region in northeastern Spain (for now), on 25 June 1852.

The young Gaudí was just beginning his career, having designed Casa Vicens earlier that year. He would spend much of his life imagining unique homes to be built for wealthy patrons.

His wealthiest and most powerful patron, however, would be Almighty God. He was called to build a house for his Son--the ultimate expression of his Christian faith.

His work was the result of his many infuences: Gothic, Moorish, Orientalist--but his primary ideas came from nature, science and mathematics. He was the best known artist of any type within Catalan Modernism, his own country's expression of Art Nouveau.

Gaudí knew he would be gone long before his masterpiece would be finished. As he once said, /El meu client no té pressa/ ("My client is not in a hurry").

And indeed he did not survive to see its completion. He died in Barcelona on 10 June 1926, of injuries sustained from being struck by a streetcar. He was buried in the crypt of his church, and his tomb and the crypt can be visited today.

Many things have happened in Barcelona after the artist's life: the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship, the second World War, the Cold War, the birth of the European Union, the War on Terror, the Catalan independence movement. Work on the church has been slow due to various events and, until recenty, the lack of technology needed to properly realize Gaudí's lofty vision.

But at last, the church, consecrated a basilica in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI, is expected to be finished by 2026, one hundred years after the master's death. There is also an active cause for his beatification and canonization.

My goal is to write an epic symphony, or rather, a "symphony-opera", about the life and faith of Gaudí, and the building of Sagrada Família, in celebration of the future completion of the church. I'll be attempting to write the libretto myself, as much as I can; it will mostly be in Catalan and Latin (the work is to contain a setting of the Catholic Mass as well).

As for the music itself, I'm trying to imagine what kind of music Gaudí would've written had he been a composer. I've chosen him as a subject because his eclectic and experimental style reminds me so much of my own.

I'm expecting this to be a very long work, possibly six to seven hours in total duration.

Instrumentation (tentative) for the symphony. It's for a very large orchestra, in the style of Wagner.

1 piccolo
3 flutes
3 oboes
1 cor anglais
2 Bb/A clarinets
1 Eb clarinet
1 bass clarinet
3 bassoons
1 contrabassoon
saxophones
Catalan shawms
bagpipe (sac de gemecs)
8 horns
4 trumpets
3 tenor trombones
1 bass trombone
1 bass tuba
1 euphonium or tenor tuba
6 timpani, 2 players
bass and snare drums, cymbals, tamtam, triangle
other percussion
glockenspiel, bells
piano
celesta
organ
guitar
2 harps
16 violins I
14 violins II
12 violas
10 cellos
8 double basses

A smaller, early music-style ensemble is also used, mostly for the recitative sections. This contains violins, violas, cellos and bass (with the addition of violas da gamba) and some of the usual wind instruments, but harpsichord, recorders, crumhorns and other instruments from the Renaissance and Baroque periods are used. Also, Middle Eastern instruments will be used: oud (replaing the lute), qanun and various percussion; much of the music in general will use maqam scales, which often contain quarter tones and other microtonal pitches (the work as a whole will be in 72 equal temperament).

The photo is of the Passion façade of Sagrada Família, which I took in April 2019.