The Cors de Clavé were not only a response to social conflicts, they also participated, albeit indirectly, in the development of Catalan language and identity in nineteenth century Catalonia, which sometimes created social tension. The choruses performed in both Catalan and Spanish although Clavé never really addressed this issue of language publicly nor participated in the promotion of Catalan language at any moment. His personal correspondence, his newspaper articles, his entire personal archive (held at the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya in San Cugat del Vallès), for instance, are in Spanish and in them, he does not mention having any linguistic program nor does he put forth any linguistic ideology in the creation of the choral groups. One could say that a correspondence in Spanish for a Catalan intellectual at that time is quite normal. However, and given that Clavé is a figure that has been considered one who promoted Catalan identity and language with his work, this aspect is worth mentioning.

One particular performance of the choruses in Madrid, at the Zarzuela theatre in 1863, is most helpful in understanding the linguistic tensions between Catalan and Castilian and how the stage, and especially the music, could rework cultural and linguistic divisions. This event also helps explain how affect plays a role in understanding the social tensions stemming from the formation of cultural politics and groups, especially the tension between Barcelona (the most important economic center at that time) and Madrid (the capital and political center). In 1863, the choruses of workers gave a series of concerts in Madrid at the Zarzuela Theater. While he was in the capital (while organizing the concerts some months before they took place as well as during the concerts), Clavé wrote a series of letters to his wife Isabel in which he expressed the difficulties he was facing in his attempt to penetrate the ritualized and codified space of the Madrilenian theater. In his letters, he emphasized the difficulties of finding a public park that would allow a gathering of such a large number of participants: “Los jardines públicos que hay aquí están desacreditados y además son reducidos. El Paraíso, que es un jardín recién construido y creo el mejor no puede contener más allá de dos mil quinientas a tres mil personas y esto no basta.” (“Carta a Isabel” 1863, May 7).

The spatial opposition that Clavé points out reveals a cultural opposition between Madrid and Barcelona: in Madrid, the parks are discredited, while in Barcelona they are the perfect space for festivals. Carbonell i Guberna writes that Clavé intended to organize a festival with a choir of 500 members in Madrid (Josep Anselm Clavé 301). We perceive in the letter how impossible it seemed to organize such an event in the capital. The fact that the parks could gather hundreds or thousands of citizens to attend a concert of workers on stage was seen as negative in the capital. Moreover, Clavé insists that the limited space of the parks would not offer a good setting for the massive phenomenon that the choral concerts had become in Barcelona. The public parks were, for the choruses of workers, a socio-symbolic space associated with music and entailing the collective. In the end, the concerts took place in the Zarzuela Theater, a prestigious space in Madrid at that time. ⁽¹⁾

In a letter written in Madrid on June 16, 1863, after one of the concerts, Clavé writes about his success: “el triunfo de anoche es uno de los más grandes que he alcanzado en mi vida. … Anoche todo el mundo hablaba en catalán.” The two important elements in this fragment are the metonym “todo el mundo” and the verb “hablar.” This metonym, far from offering a dialectic, excludes distinction, whether geographical, social or cultural. In addition, the metonym is closely linked to the physical context of the theater. In this fragment, three spaces are connected and juxtaposed: the theater, the linguistic space, and the national space —represented by a fusion of the Madrilenian public and the Catalan singers in “todo el mundo.” The metonym implies that choral music leads to the transmission of a language. Singing, here, is presented as the first step towards the construction of a community through linguistic exchange. Two days later, on June 19, 1863, following a concert in front of Queen Isabel II and General Juan Prim, the composer wrote, “Hemos catalanizado a medio Madrid. No se oye hablar más que en catalán, pues los que son paisanos nuestros, se envanecen de serlo y los que no lo son, se empeñan en probarnos que nos comprenden. Que derrota para mi castellanizada amiga!” Clavé, as the director leading the workers on stage, presents himself as the one who incites this “catalanización” and as the one who not only defends Catalans’ pride of being Catalans in Madrid but also creates a path for dialogue between Castilians and Catalans in the capital —this “understanding.” He presents himself in his letter as the creator of social and linguistic harmony, the one who dissipates the dissonances of modernity that have arisen from the existing economic opposition and concurrence between Madrid and Barcelona.

This moment in which the “catalanización” takes place is an inversion of the diglossia. Let’s recall that during the nineteenth century in Spain, Castilian was the language of culture, especially in the 1860’s. Manuel Jorba explains that “en 1800–1833, [el castellà] dominava entre les capes socials més privilegiades socialment i cultural, respecte a la llengua catalana, que era la llengua ambiental generalitzada, una actitud de fet contrària a la seva utilització normal, especialment com a llengua de la literatura o de l’expressió culta escrita, en benefici de la castellana” (82).

Choral music, in fact, just like the Jocs Florals, contributed to the re-emergence of the Catalan language in the nineteenth century. Rubio García says that philharmonic and choral societies played a fundamental role in the linguistic unity in Catalonia, especially with presentations of zarzuelas:⁽²⁾

Falta todavía un estudio sociológico y valorativo del relevante papel que ha jugado la zarzuela en la mentalidad y unidad lingüística española. En regiones de tipo bilingüe, opino que su papel ha sido capital. En Cataluña, sobre todo – algo similar afirmaríamos de Valencia – donde existe una inveterada tradición musical, la zarzuela ha sido acogida, sentida y propagada con encendido entusiasmo. Las sociedades filarmónicas y corales aceptaron, incorporaron en sus repertorios, difundieron la zarzuela como algo suyo y peculiar. (162–63)

Jordi Galí, for his part, explains that by 1868, the most important cultural institutions in Catalonia had begun to adopt Catalan but that the Cors de Clavé (just like the Liceo, the Jocs Florals and the Ateneu Barcelonés) was an institution that used Catalan for its activities long before 1868: “Cal notar en aquest aspecte que el sexenni 1868–1874 va ésser, com en tants d’altres, un revulsiu i una frontera decisiva. Abans de 1868 les institucions autòctones que es constituïen a Catalunya naixen amb el castellà com a llengua vehicular escrita. Després de 1868 les institucions culturals més importants adopten ja d’entrada el català” (109).

Choral music served, thus, as a public platform for the creation and diffusion of Catalan culture. Jorba mentions that Valentí Almirall “proposava Clavé, Soler i Balaguer, pel comú denominador progressista, com a figures literàries representatives i, especialment els dos primers, modèliques, de la Renaixença” (“La Renaixença” 29). Choral music in Catalan was used for the diffusion and expression of a new and dynamic society and of a defined historical moment: nineteenth century Iberia undergoing socio-political changes due to massive industrialization and the appearance of a new social class of industrial workers. These workers, who were the agents of Catalan industrialization, occupied the stage physically, under the direction of an intellectual. They occupied a bourgeois cultural space, the theater, through sound in Catalan. This musical manifestation was more than a simple performance of popular songs by a popular group. Such occupation was, in fact, intended to erode the monopolies established by the bourgeoisie concerning cultural and linguistic practices. Staging the workers meant showing the existing tensions between working class and bourgeoisie, between Madrid and Barcelona, between Castilian and Spanish and between high and low culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the occupation of the stage did not imply an occupation of the public space. Clavé presented a new pedagogical model on stage: his ability to create harmony among the workers through music. The stage was a physical space in which a workers’ presence and harmony could be produced in Catalan and in which choral music reformed and controlled this supposedly turbulent and dissonant class. In this sense, the stage cannot be considered a fictional space but a space of innovation and a sort of laboratory in which a possible social state was rehearsed. The staging of the musical harmonious workers and the message contained in the lyrics of the songs, that heavily insisted on the peaceful, caring and loving aspects of the singers, were presented as the starting points for the success of the development of a rhetoric of love for the collective in times of radical social changes. This idea aimed at banishing the image of the workers as a possible urban threat to the rest of society. The workers on stage were not claiming any social rights nor were they questioning the current social order. On the contrary, they were singing “Progrés, virtut i amor / Es nostre lema sant; / Soldats som de la indústria, / Soldats som de la pau” (La Maquinista) —a song actually performed in Madrid in 1863. In it, the workers are in search of happiness and social communion and ask for recognition from their fellow citizens by projecting an image of serenity and by appealing to their audience’s emotions. The public should revisit their consideration of what the workers mean for industrial society, as the verse “Progress, virtue and love” puts the accent on three new key aspects of the worker: his participation in industry, in citizenship and in a community bonded by affective relationships.

In fact, Clavé had to navigate a musical context that was quite hostile to the choruses of workers for several reasons. Again, the performances that the choruses of workers gave in Madrid in 1863 can be a point of departure to understanding the tensions and cultural dissonances between the capital, Madrid, and Catalonia. Clavé had to gain authority in the public sphere to make his musical practice recognized and accepted in the cultural world. The concept of “authority” here encompasses different aspects: the authority that the Catalan culture was gaining in the nineteenth century; the authority that the Catalan language was acquiring as a language of culture; the authority that the group of workers sought in its relationship with high culture; and, above all, the authority with which Clavé invested himself as a composer and leader of a group beyond other composers’ institutional authority and beyond the authority of government spheres. This last point, Clavé’s authority and recognition in the public sphere, is the key to understanding how choral music for the workers can be seen as a mode of harmonizing the workers. The composer not only presented a social class educated through choral practice on stage, but he also positioned himself as a leader of a very specific social group —the masses of Catalan workers— that is, as an intellectual vested with the power of harmonizing hundreds of industrial workers on stage and of transmitting an affective discourse linked to that group. In his correspondence, the concerns of several composers regarding his capacity to conduct and tune the group on stage can be found:

Para colmo de fatalidad ensayamos La Violeta y el coro, es decir los primeros tenores desafinaron espantosamente. Estaban allí Barbieri, Gaztambide, Oudrid y compañía, en una palabra todos los que nos herían en público sin consideración alguna. … Oudrid se largaba del teatro, y Gaztambide tuvo la desvergüenza de decirme que suprimiese las piezas con acompañamiento de orquesta por cuanto el coro no estaba educado más que para cantar a voces solas, en cuyas piezas el público no podía notar tanto que bajaban la tonalidad. (“Carta a Isabel” 1863, June 16).

The composers mentioned in this letter, Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Joaquín Gaztambide and Cristóbal Oudrid, represent musical institutions and, among other things, developed the Zarzuela genre in the mid nineties (García Carretero XV). They were the ones who, during the rehearsals in Madrid, supervised, judged and analyzed the value of the works chosen for the concerts. They had a cultural authority to point out the choir members’ lack of education and capacity to sing in tune and to categorize the concerts as a farce. In his correspondence, Clavé refers constantly to his confrontations with institutional Spanish composers. These confrontations not only resulted from the workers’ only having one-time access to cultural spaces that belonged to other classes, such as the Liceu theater in 1862 in Barcelona or the Zarzuela theater in 1863 in Madrid, but also from a different pedagogy. The success of the concerts crystallized a method that went much further than musical education. Producing a workers’ presence on stage through a rhetoric of love and affect instead of a rhetoric that confronted the social order and asked for social change, meant witnessing Clavé’s influence over a threatening class and his power to harmonize the workers and society at large. As Michael Hardt affirms, “the affects straddle …two divides: between the mind and body, and between actions and passion” (xi). The actions of the working masses at work or in the public sphere were the greatest worry for the governing elite at the time. They thought that the masses were governed by their passions instead of their reason. Clavé’s concerts were a visual and auditory representation of the possibility of governing rationally, through a specific tempo, these masses of workers and at the same time, validated the authority of the director as a possible social leader. It presented harmony as a technique of governance.

The letters Clavé wrote from Madrid in 1863 denounce the opposition between high and low culture, between industry and theater, and this refusal of that opposition is what separated Clavé’s concerts from other musical manifestations at that time:

Desde nuestra llegada a Madrid, te confieso francamente que me había espantado y temía que un disgusto amargo sería el premio de mis sacrificios para iniciar en esta corte la institución que tan buenos resultados está dando en Cataluña; los comentarios disparatados que de los coristas y de las composiciones se hacían; … el que se propalase por los cafés que mis coros no eran más que una mala murga, y el que los mismos catalanes creyeron que tal vez no cuajaría mi nuevo género de música entre los petulantes cortesanos, todo me había causado tal desazón que temía, con algún fundamento, llevarme un solemne chasco. (“Carta a Isabel” 1863, June 16)

The vocabulary used by Clavé in this fragment shows a dialectical opposition between the Catalan choruses and the Court in Madrid. The choruses are defined as “mala murga” by the Madrilenian people who Clavé considers “petulantes.” The opposition was not due only to social reasons but also to the kind of concerts that the people in Madrid were accustomed to attending. The fragment shows the reception that the workers gained in Catalonia as a result of their choral activity, a reception that would not have occurred in the capital. This opposition is further accentuated by the choruses’ being presented as an aesthetic novelty: “mi nuevo género de música.” Clavé, in this letter, insists that he is creating a new musical aesthetic when he puts workers on stage, an aesthetics closely linked to the social project behind the musical practice, that is, a harmonious presentation of the caring and peaceful workers on stage. His correspondence shows his desire to obtain social, cultural and institutional recognition from those who controlled cultural productions and determined the validity of the spectacles. Clavé did several things to obtain socio-cultural recognition: he founded his own company, several newspapers (El Eco de Euterpe, El Metrónomo, etc.), and a printing house (Euterpe). Carbonell i Guberna asserts that these elements propagandized and permitted automatic renewal of the Sociedad Coral Euterpe (La societat coral Euterpe 31–37).

The composer had to operate in the midst of constant confrontation with institutions and the government in order to maintain an aesthetic legitimacy for the workers’ choruses. Those who opposed his project negated a fundamental aspect of it: the fact that a composer could educate workers musically and, at the same time, organize cultural events with them without disturbing the social order. They could not accept either the discourse of love or the social pacification that the composer was attaching to his musical practice. This social pacification through the presentation of a harmonious group on stage was, as I explained, a way to propose a technique of governing the working class. This is the “nuevo género de música” that Clavé created and referred to in his letters. The ruling classes perceived his project as a threat to social order for two reasons: first, because of the socio-political implications that staging a peaceful working class could mean for the anti-workers propaganda developed by industrialists who were maintaining the systems of exploitation in their factories, and second, because of the implication of this staging that the director could control an entire social class. And it meant, above all, that he could do what the government at that time seemed not to be able to achieve. As such, the director’s hand —the one which composed music and directed the workers on stage— was the point of articulation for the creation of a socio-cultural harmony on stage.