BarcelonaOn February 25, 1923, thousands of people went to the Corts stadium. At the gates, bouquets of flowers were handed out to the women entering the Barça field. And there were many of them, as was usual back then, even if more than one says that seeing women in football is a modern thing. On that day, Catalan civil society organized a tribute to Joan Gamper, not only as the father of FC Barcelona and president of the club, a position he would cede after a few months to Enric Cardona. It was also a tribute to his task of caring for and promoting Catalan sport, which is why institutions such as the Provincial Council and the City Council joined in. The highlight was a friendly between the Blaugrana club and a selection of Catalan players. And it would also be the first time that the Barça fans would sing the club’s new anthem. The first written in Catalan, with lyrics by the politician and writer Rafael Folch. The composer of the music was none other than maestro Morera, the same person who had written it The Holy Thorn, with lyrics by Àngel Guimerà, i Descending from the Font del Gat. On the day of the match, Orfeó Gracienc performed different works, the last of which was the anthem. Morera witnessed the moment from the stadium box, very close to Joan Gamper.
The anthem was already ready days ago. Some party programs were printed with the lyrics of the song, dubbed only as Anthem del FC Barcelona, which could be purchased the previous days, as reported on February 18, when the last game of the Catalan Championship of that year was to be played. A match that also served to decide the title between Europe and Barça. But it was not possible to play because too many people went to the Graciencs field and the authorities did not give permission for fear of incidents. Football already raised passions, then. The game would end up being played in March in Girona, with a comfortable 1-0 victory, which would give the title to Europe. The fight for this championship was so tense that Europe was – along with Espanyol – the only club that did not participate in the tribute to Gamper. Yes, Sabadell, Badalona, Avenç and Espanya went there.
It was a growing Barça. That year the Hungarian Franz Platko made his debut as goalkeeper and exceeded 10,000 members for the first time, taking advantage of the momentum of the les Corts stadium, inaugurated in 1922. The club had also taken sides politically, starting to use Catalan in the official documentation during the decade of 1910. In all these changes, the club’s new anthem had to be, of course, in Catalan, with lyrics by Folch and music by maestro Morera. The premiere, therefore, was the day of the tribute to Gamper, in which all civil society gathered at Les Corts. “The Permanent Council of the Commonwealth of Catalonia, on the occasion of the tribute paid to you by the Catalan sporting elements, has agreed to send you the expression of its sympathy for the noble work you carry out in the Catalan sport and especially since the presidency of FC Barcelona. You have been able to give our people’s sporting events a high sense of civic dignity and encouraging effectiveness. To your love for physical culture you have been able to add the elements of patriotism. Foreigner by birth, you have assimilated with the feelings and ideals of our people and that is why we Catalans love you as a son of our land. The tribute organized by the Catalan sporting elements is an act of justice to your activity and your faith. In the expansion of Catalan physical culture, you have a main place that makes you deserving of the affection and gratitude of Catalonia,” said Josep Puig i Cadafalch, the president of the Commonwealth.
In addition to Orfeó Gracienc, who was in charge of premiering the new anthem, the Barcelona Municipal Band led by maestro Joan Lamote de Grignon also performed, who played Wagner pieces, sardanas and a composition called FC Barcelona, second Catalan march, Lamote de Grignon’s work for the occasion. That day, therefore, two pieces dedicated to the club were premiered. A member of a family with French roots, this maestro would be another key figure in Catalan music at the time, as director of the city’s Municipal Band and as Pau Casals’ companion in adventures. At half-time, by the way, a bust of Gamper was unveiled, the work of Josep Llimona, a key artist who was also a member of Barça. Shortly after, Morera’s anthem would be played for the first time.
Mulberry, Sardanes and Catalanism
Morera was a main figure in Catalan music. For Barça, it was quite an honor that he agreed to make the anthem. Born on Carrer del Cometa in the Gothic Quarter, where a plaque commemorates the house where he was born, he was the son of the musician Enric Joan Lluís Gonçaga Morera i Viura, who in 1867 left to make his fortune in Buenos Aires and obtained a position in Teatro Alcázar as double bassist. The father would be Enric’s first teacher, of course. In 1881 the Moreras returned to Barcelona, where Enric would become a student of the pianist Isaac Albéniz. Things in life, the musician’s son, Alfonso Albéniz, would be a footballer and the first player to move from Barça to Madrid. Culture and sport went hand in hand, without problems.
Morera would return to Argentina to work at the end of the 19th century. Afterwards, he stayed in Belgium, before the definitive return to Catalonia, marked by such different influences as Andean music and Wagner. His first success came thanks to the symphonic poem Introduction to Atlantis, inspired by the poetry of Father Cinto Verdaguer. From that moment, several poets and playwrights sought Morera’s collaboration. One of them, of course, was Àngel Guimerà. Morera founded the Societat Choral Catalunya Nova, made up of singers from the working class, and recovered popular Catalan songs such as Canigó Mountains, the nightingale i The laborers. Passionate about the sardana, which he would take care of and promote, he left for posterity The Holy Thorn and the popular Descending from the Font del Gat.
That Maestro Morera was in charge of composing the hymn already said a lot about everything Gamper had done then. The lyrics were written by Rafael Folch, a left-wing Catalanist who served in the Socialist Union of Catalonia. Folch, who was also a poet and writer, did a great job to promote the use of Catalan: he was the author of a Catalan legal vocabularya book with all the Catalan verbs and the booklets 34 rules to write the Catalan language correctly. Folch worked all his life to take care of the Catalan language. If Morera was a key personality in the cultural life of the time, so was he. He would marry Maria Pi i Ferrer, writer, politician and one of the pioneers of creating a women’s sports club in Catalonia. And his children would be the doctor Albert Folch i Pi, the biochemist Jordi Folch i Pi, the engineer Frederic Folch i Pi and the editor Núria Folch i Pi, who would marry the writer Joan Sales, the editor of Mercè Rodoreda Núria, in fact, was called Maria. But Àngel Guimerà, a friend of the family, said when she was little that she looked like Núria and that’s how she stayed forever. Guimerà was a friend of both Folch and Morera, with whom he had done The Holy Thorn. That Barça anthem from 1923, by the way, had these lyrics:
“We are the heroes of a fierce battle
that it is all struggle and play;
long live football, enriched game
with combat resonances.
Yay!
Long live football which is a pleasure
and, as a struggle, an ideal
he has created the block of steel
that our Club will make immortal.
Yay!
Sport and Country have brought us together
in the embrace of strength;
that’s why we bring from the city
of Barcelona, name and coat of arms.
Yay!
We are precursors of the brave flock
that in the future he will know how to fight
for the great triumph; long live football
which already teaches us to succeed.
Yay!
Long live football that warms hearts
and our will rages;
long live the football that will make us strong
for heure glory and freedom.
Yay!
Francoism cornered him: what was this about a hymn written by Catalanists and republicans? And in the 1940s no new anthem was established. There simply wasn’t any. When another one was made, it was in Catalan, but politically correct, with no mention of Catalonia. It was the Barcelona, always up from 1949 by Esteve Calzada, with music by Joan Dotras. In 1957, Josep Badia did that Anthem in the stadium dedicated to the Camp Nou in which, for the first time, the word Barça appeared, with music by Adolf Cabané. In the 70s, the current anthem would arrive and also the vindication of the anthem of 1923. But with a mistake, because for a long time it was explained that it had been the club’s first. And it wasn’t true. Manel Tomàs, documentarian at the Center for Documentation and Studies of Barça, found the reference to an early hymn from 1910 in the book History of the FC Barcelonawritten by Daniel Carbó in 1924. That year the Galician military José Antonio Lodeiro Piñeiroa composed the Football Club Barcelona Anthem March. Lodeiro, native of Mondoñedo (Lugo) and chief musician of the band of the infantry regiment of Alcántara no. 58, was assigned to Barcelona between 1907 and 1915, a time when he fell in love with Barça and became a member. The score was not recovered until 2014. Xabier Andrés Garrote, son, grandson and great-grandson of the founding musicians of the Banda Garrote, from Ortigueira, A Coruña, contacted the club to report that he had found a score manuscript for piano of the FC Barcelona anthem from 1910, among the vast musical archive of his father, Andrés Garrote, the last director of the saga.
This first anthem was premiered on July 17, 1910, at a party held in the old field on Carrer Indústria, known as l’Escopidora, to celebrate the titles won that season. A military band of the regiment of Alcántara, that of Lodeiro Piñeiroa, interpreted it. In the stadium, some pamphlets had been distributed with the lyrics, written by Santiago Albert López, a military man born in Puerto Rico in 1876, when the island was still Spanish, who would go around half of the Peninsula. He was in Barcelona from 1907 to 1912, when he composed a lyric that was not recovered until 2017 following an ARA article that explained the discovery of a sheet music with the lyrics in the collection private property of the Peris de Vargas family. The hymn, in Spanish, began with a “Solid triumphs Barcelona foot-ball will have. Warfare our tactic, we reach everywhere. Successes and more successes without being able to beat us. Well, wherever Barcelona football goes, it knows how to fight, it knows how to succeed“.
The anthem of 1910 was in force until February 25, 1923, although it seems that it did not take root much among the social mass. On the other hand, the second did make a fortune, until Franco’s troops entered via the Diagonal. Morera and Folch’s anthem was the symbol of a time and a country, as well as the Barça song current, written in 1974 with lyrics by Josep Maria Espinàs and music by Manuel Valls, the uncle of the French politician of the same name, who returned to Barcelona to try to make a political career without much luck. The history of Barça’s anthems is as fascinating as that of their authors, with personalities such as Espinàs – recently deceased -, Morera and Folch. People who loved a language, a country and also a football club.