125 YEARS OF CAU FERRAT. The construction of an ideal (1894-2019)

Poster "La Fada"

Miquel Utrillo i Morlius (Barcelona, 1862 – Sitges, 1934)
Poster for the opera La fada (The fairy), with Enric Morera’s music and Jaume Massó’s poems
Barcelona: Tipografia L’Avenç, 1897
Lithograph on paper
Museu del Cau Ferrat, Sitges

Miquel Utrillo i Morlius (Barcelona, 1862 – Sitges, 1934)

Poster for the opera La fada (The fairy), with Enric Morera’s music and Jaume Massó’s poems

Barcelona: Tipografia L’Avenç, 1897

Lithograph on paper

Museu del Cau Ferrat, Sitges

Rusiñol turned the Cau Ferrat into a sort of temple of Total Art, where he was the priest of a new religion of art. Music and dance are also part of the artistic languages related to the Cau. Manuel de Falla composed a good deal of his work Noches en los Jardines de España (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) there; Enric Granados and Isaac Albéniz sojourned there; other musicians passed by and performed at the Cau, such as Enric Morera, the Belgians Ernest Chausson, Eugène Ysaye or Guillaume Guidé, where they performed, among others, works by César Franck or Erik Satie.

Santiago Rusiñol was also a huge fan of classical music and we know that several performers played works by Beethoven and Bach, whom the painter was very fond of, on his piano. On the evening of August 29th, 1895, Rusiñol and his friends organized a curious dance performance. A dancer standing on a platform anchored in the sea in front of Cau, performed the Serpentine Dance with the intention of emulating the dance that the famous dancer Loïe Fuller had made fashionable. Illuminated with colored spotlights from the Cau’s windows, the dancer swayed across the water to the sound of the music and surrounded by a multitude of curious onlookers who had navigated their boats to the edge of the platform. Others, fascinated by the spectacle, admired from the land.

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