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As a child, she discovered the piano when her teacher decided to set up an after-school music school. At home, seeing that the child was promising, her parents decided to buy a second-hand piano. And today, Raquel García Tomás is already a solid and tenacious composer, with clear ideas and an intense heart. The best proof: her work. In 2020, she received the National Music Award for the interdisciplinary, innovative and daring nature of her compositional language.
Concerned with the social reality that surrounds her, Raquel García Tomás reflects in her creations on the human complexity and this endless universe. Her next opera, Alexina B., to be premiered at the Liceu in 2023, has as its protagonist Adelaide Herculine Barbin, the first intersex person for whom we have a first-person memoir and who we discovered in France in 1978 thanks to Michel Foucault. In doing so, Raquel García Tomás will become the second woman in the history of the great theater of Barcelona to create an opera there.
Did you get to this point by chance or after a lot of thought?
It was more the result of a lot of hard work and a certain talent that I must have. You have to be there at the right moment when you meet someone you're going to work with, but you also have to know how to take advantage of that coincidence. There was chance, of course, but also instinct. And a lot of inner observation, knowing how I want to create, who I am, where I need to go, understanding how I can work more comfortably. And to be committed, to fill in the commissions. If I hadn't worked well, they might not have called me back.
Beyond the diversity of your works and projects, what are the constants and concerns that remain in your work?
I like my works (I don't always succeed in doing this) to promote personal and artistic fulfillment, i.e., to get feedback on the work I create. There are works, such as the opera I'm currently working on, Alexina B, whose subject has a strong social charge, that invite me to a deeper inner transformation, because it allows me to discover social realities that are often foreign and unknown to me.
You talk about your new opera Alexina B. libretto by Irene Gayraud, which will premiere in March at the Liceu. You are working again with Marta Pazos, with whom you previously worked in I am Narcissistic in 2018.
Yes, I will work with Marta again, because my experience with her was fantastic. In Alexina B. I could have chosen a director and I thought of her. I did not hesitate for a moment.
How do you work together?
We understand each other very well. I like the way she works during the creative process: her way of communicating, her character, her personality. I also like the end result, because working together makes us both better: with her, I feel like a better composer!
The two works you worked on together are very different. Je suis narcissiste (2018) is an opera bouffe, Alexina B., on the other hand, is something quite different: the story of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, known as Alexina B., a transgender person. The challenge is very different.
Yes, the two works have very different themes. Je suis narcissiste is shorter, with a topical theme, absurdist, comic humor, a musical treatment that refers to cinema, clichés and irony, aimed at making us laugh at ourselves. What's more, it was fiction. A satire, really. Alexina B., on the other hand, is based on a real event in the 19th century. She was the first intersex person to write her memoirs. Obviously, there were already intersex people, there have always been intersex people, it's a biological question. There are medical documents to prove it. But with Alexina, it just so happens that this is the first time anyone has written about their sexuality in the first person. Alexina B. is therefore a serious opera, a drama, with a profound and moving theme. The piece lasts about two hours, and the cast is larger. Also, as it's set in the 19th century, I'm borrowing from popular and archaic music.
Let's just say it's a more adult work.
In another of your creations, DisPLACE, you dealt with evictions and gentrification; in Je suis narcissique, with egocentric individualism. And in Alexina B, identity. Could it be that you're not interested in art for art's sake? Your work always attempts to address important issues.
Yes, I like to deal with fundamental issues, which ultimately enable me to be a better citizen. I remember that at the time of DisPLACE, the term "gentrification" wasn't yet popular. When we discovered this concept and the way in which some city councils are striving to let city centers die, we realized that Barcelona had become a paradigmatic city of gentrification. For me, operas always allow me to evaluate and reflect on reality, to think critically, whether it's a comic opera like Je suis narcissique or a drama like Alexina B.
In the same vein, during the months of strict confinement, L'Auditori offered you a commission, and Suite of Myself was born; a work based on various fragments of Bach's music, accompanied by a luminous, solemn text like Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself". How did it come about?
As L'Auditori wanted a work inspired by Bach and I like to experiment, I accepted the commission. The performers in the choir were amateurs, and I thought the text would help them memorize the melodic lines of each voice. So I started working with Whitman's text. I selected the poems or verses that moved me the most, but I also chose the fragments that I felt would be most moving in such a particular health emergency as the one we were experiencing, with the aim of creating a work in keeping with that period. And, in this sense, I thought Whitman's poems were the right choice, for the magnanimous, spiritual breath they convey, for the transcendence they exude, beyond the fact that they are not strictly religious texts. They went perfectly with Bach's music.
On October 7, you'll be presenting a new piece, Sightings, commissioned by the Mixtur Festival, the Ramon Llull Foundation and Hémisphère son, performed by the young German ensemble Via Nova in Barcelona, with filmmaker and illustrator Pere Ginard. Tell me, both of you, how did this collaboration begin? Pere?
Pere Ginard: We met at the Auditori, in 2016, around a project entitled Històries Elèctriques. They contacted us through different channels and for different purposes: me to propose live animations during the show, and Raquel to compose the themes. And that was the start of our collaboration. We don't usually work on joint projects, but on this occasion I happened to have received a grant from the town hall for an experimental animated short about the underwater world, an imaginary world that appeals to me. I was thinking about it, and suddenly the proposal to do a piece for Mixtur in 2022 came up. So we decided to create something that would complement each other.
Raquel: Mixtur commissioned me to do a piece with video. I thought about it and contacted Pere, with whom I'd already worked "off-line", as he'd put images on one of my works after the fact. But for Sightings (premiered at Weimar's Kunstfest on September 5, editor's note), as the piece is in concert format, we began to work in a different way, seeking a dialogue between the two disciplines.
And how did you go about working together?
Pere: I started assembling images and preparing a script based on the imaginary world of underwater myths, which I've already told you seduce and fascinate me.
Mermaids, giant squids...?
Pere: Yes, yes, monsters, newts and a long etcetera. Finally, to give structure to all this, we invented a narrative framework.
Raquel: Exactly. I'd never collaborated with filmmakers or video artists before, so I wasn't used to it. For me, the interest of this project with Pere was to rethink the process we were building. I'm a perfectionist, and until something convinces me, I don't move on. On the other hand, in this work, it was the other way round, because Pere presented me with images that were not yet definitive, so that I could rethink the work we were doing, as an open, back-and-forth process.
We fed off each other.
Interesting.
Raquel: Yes, we're talking about a work with live music, although there is a pre-recorded electronic base. In cinema, we normally work the other way round: first we concentrate on the images, then on the soundtrack. But, in this creation, everything had to be quantified in a tempo; that's why everything happens to the second, it's synchronized. If Pere had first introduced images, and then I had composed the music to link them, perhaps the instrumentalists wouldn't have been able to intuitively follow the rhythm Pere had proposed. So the simplest thing for me to do was to first propose a sound discourse with chords, and then for Pere to work on the basis of these chords, synchronizing them to facilitate the work of the performers.
And how do you want the public to receive this work?
Raquel: While it's true that the aesthetic of this creation is dark, it's also light and fresh. In fact, it can be seen as fun, a slightly strange story that arouses amusement, healthy curiosity and noble perplexity.
Pere: Yes, I agree. From the third minute, we know we're witnessing a story of explorers. However, the meaning of this quest, whatever it may be, is much more open-ended.
Interview by Txema Seglers
October 7, 2022 at Mixtur festival, Fabra i Coats :
- meeting at 3pm with Raquel García Tomás and Pere Ginard at Fabra i Coats
- Sightings by Raquel García Tomás and Pere Ginard with the Via Nova ensemble at 8pm
