A Catalan in Villa Medici

Midnight at the entrance of Villa Medici in Rome.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
25 July 2022 Monday 05:04
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A Catalan in Villa Medici

Midnight at the entrance of Villa Medici in Rome. Composer Hèctor Parra takes out his scholarship card from the French Academy and activates the mechanism that opens the small door at the main entrance. You have to bow your head to, once inside, feel the gaze of Louis XIV presiding over the room from the top of some stairs.

This 17th-century statue, by Domenico Guidi, will not be the only one to be seen in the palace founded by Ferdinand I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, although it will be one of the few originals, as plaster reproductions abound, the result of years in which academics were copying and contributing to the inventory of the classics. These pensionnaires (scholars) have been chosen for 350 years to come to disconnect, investigate, inspire and collaborate with each other in this school of improvement without a teacher.

Parra is one of the 16 who are about to finish their term here. He is perhaps the first Catalan artist to receive a scholarship from the Academy that Louis XIV established in Rome for French artists, although in the 20th century it was opened up to candidates from the colonies and Francophones. Not surprisingly, the Barcelona composer has been living in Paris for two decades where he is a professor at Ircam, the Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique / musique, created by Pierre Boulez.

"No, wait, the painter Antoni Ros Blasco was also here in 1984 and was one of the first non-French to win the contest," says the musician, reviewing the annals. And we must not forget the Barcelona-born French writer Mathias Enard. Already in the 21st century there have been two Basque composers, Ramon Lazkano and Mikel Urquiza... Artists with a career are invited, which is why, like Parra, some come with their families. The allowance: 3,500 euros per month.

It's midnight and you'll have to wait for dawn to enjoy the captivating views over the city, but in the background you can make out the picture of the Vatican while you hear the beat of a disco that's raging beyond the Villa Borghese gardens, adjoining those of the Villa Medici.

“Napoleon was the one who moved the Academy here. For the simple reason that the city of Rome was overlooked from the Pincio hill”, points out the composer and eventual Cicerone. In the light of the moon you can also see the bas-reliefs on the façade that overlooks the Villa's Versailles gardens. Originals from the Greco-Roman era that cannot be returned as they are part of the architectural structure of the palace, such as those garlands of the Ara Pacis, the altar where the Roman Senate celebrated the triumph of Augustus in the campaigns of Gaul or Hispania.

Inhabiting the villa is like living in another time and in another world, but the creation is still very contemporary. In the dining room, on whose balcony a couple of pensionnaires have breakfast, the walls maintain the stucco of Balthus, who was director of the Academy for a time. And in one of the rooms his famous lamp still stands.

Nowadays directors do not renew beyond five or six years, but the longest-lived was a composer, says Parra: Jacques Ibert (from 1937 to 1940 and from 1944 to 1960). Curiously, Ravel was rejected as an intern. “They turned him down three times! Fiasco for the Villa. Debussy was young for three years and he got fed up.

Also the first woman pensionnaire was a composer: Lili Boulanger. And this year at Villa Medici the artists have asked to remove the portraits from the salon des pensionnaires, because there were no women. Like the Indian tapestries that adorned the great hall: scenes with blacks marked by the colonial imaginary. Something that the French media echoed, because what happens at the Academy is news in France.

At Villa Medici, Parra devoted himself to the composition of the chamber opera Orgia , inspired by the eponymous theatrical text by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which the suicide of a homosexual represents an act of accusation of hypocrisy and intolerance. The Catalan musician, who receives commissions from the Philharmonie de Paris, the Louvre, the Pompidou or the Guggenheim in New York, thus returns to work with Calixto Bieito, with whom he adapted La benevolas by Jonathan Littell for the Flanders Opera.

In this case, he explores the contrast between polyphony and homophony, modernity and archaism. “I am inspired by Pasolini's dualities: past-present, death-sex, ancestral society-modern life”. The result will be seen this time in Bilbao, Peralada and the Liceu. And the BCN Clàssics could reproduce some of the piano sessions with plastic arts that have been held at the Villa Medici.

After the vernissage the artists are about to finish their scholarship, the year is winding down and there is talk of who will come next year and that there will be more women than men. Among them the Israeli composer Sivan Eldar, who was Parra's best student at Ircam. "In fact, without knowing it, I competed against her, and I felt very bad."