A Cathedral Unfinished

Walking through the quaint village of Colonia Güell, you could be transported from the September Friday evening of 2022, back to the 19th century. One hundred and thirty years ago, factory owner Eusebi Güell(famous Casa Batlló and Parc Güell) with a benevolently capitalist outlook, commissioned the building of this village; I guess with the premise that if his workers were relocated from the smog of Barcelona, so too would his textile productivity grow healthier and happy. Luckily for us locals, Colonia Güell has stayed peacefully undisturbed and largely undiscovered ever since. Tonight it’s quiet, save for the dog barks and chinking of cerveza glasses from the plaza, and if it weren’t for the pools of orange underneath the lamp posts, we would be in darkness.

Up the cobbled high street and looping around the crypt – Gaudí’s crypt, a UNESCO site since 2005 and also his best kept secret to fans of Modernism. The building has the same playful experimentation and carved homages to nature as the Sagrada Familia - where we see a recital, free on entry, advertised on the noticeboard outside.

We almost miss this flyer, since it’s partly obscured by the local gospel choir meet-up, and the noticeboard itself obscured by the van parked in the doorway, back doors flung open and professional-looking speakers inside. A young woman appears, smiling as she manoeuvres a large black case down the paving stones, towards those slanting columns that circle and bear, tarantula-like, to the crypt’s entrance.

We complete our custom loop and return to see more locals mingling outside. Look, the retired primary school teacher, chatting to the couple who own the laundrette. Their daughter-in-law, whose name I can’t remember, waves at the town councillor, somebody else’s father.

Inside it feels intimate, clandestine. Floor-lights highlight the hive-like brickwork, flooding the stone carvings in bronze. We sit in the semi-circle of curiously-carved wood-lacquered benches, and look up to rafters, the beams stretched and tensed by their irregular angles. It’s nature -in wood, brick and mortar - surpassing gravity.

A hush falls. If there were more neon-Madonna’s and luminous crosses we could be in Baz Lurman’s Romeo & Juliet, the young lover’s death scene in the Capulet family vault. But instead of Kate and Leo, a guitarrista and the woman from earlier come to the stage, now dressed in concert-black.

She settles at the harp whilst he explains they will play a style of controlled improvisation. Each song will have a shape, a rough length and time signature, a set key, and potential modulations, yet the mood will shift in every rendition.

And it’s true. The harp feels fragile and tender, the guitar percussive and raw. The improvisation creates a conversation, which, like all good conversations do, rises to moments of epiphany, celebration, and then falls, fades, when the moment has passed. Sometimes the woman sings; a sweet pure voice reminiscent of some folkloric gone age.

Unfinished Places is the name of their performance. A playful irony. One hundred and thirty years ago, Güell ran out of money, disagreed with Guadí, and the cathedral they planned to build over the crypt never came to fruition. As the final encore closes, I imagine the musical notes spiralling upwards, swirling into the space that was never filled with turrets or spires. Instead, we have a cathedral of sound.