L'Emigrant
L'Emigrant (German: The Emigrant ) is a Catalan song that sings of the longing and homesickness of emigrants .
The song was written between two major waves of Catalan emigration mainly to Latin America at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the 1890s , the national poet Jacint Verdaguer dedicated a poem to these emigrants, who were usually driven by economic hardship . As a 28-year-old, Verdaguer himself had been on board chaplain for three years from 1873 on emigrant ships between Spain and America.
In 1893 the poem was set to music by the then 21-year-old Amadeu Vives , who had founded the folk choir Orfeó Català together with Lluís Millet i Pagès in 1891 and in 1892 arranged today's national anthem Els Segadors for choir .
Soon the song with its emotional first verse - Sweet Catalonia / Home of my Heart / When it moves away from you / It dies of longing - became so popular that it was treated like a national anthem for a long time.
The song owes its strong impact to two factors: the serious turning point that emigration always represents for individuals and for society as a whole, as well as the uniquely simple and catchy melody of Amadeu Vives. It was he who, in 1926, the poem La Balanguera of Joan Alcover set to music. Since 1996 the song has been the official anthem of the Balearic island of Mallorca .
Amadeu Vives died in 1932. Twenty years later, the Catalan composer Robert Gerhard - also an émigré - used the song L'Emigrant as the basis for the film music for “Die Verblendeten” ( Secret People ) with Audrey Hepburn .
At the beginning of the 1960s, another wave of emigration from Catalonia (and from all over Spain) began. This time it was the guest workers who were mainly called into the economic miracle of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although the distances and the means of transport were not comparable to those of earlier emigrations, and saying goodbye generally no longer had this definitive character, L'Emigrant acquired such a strong meaning that it was treated like a national anthem of Catalonia alongside the Virolai . The hymn Els Segador , adopted in 1937, was banned under Franco until 1976.
L'Emigrant still arouses such strong emotions that almost every major Catalan artist has included this song in their repertoire.
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Footnotes
- ↑ With this picture Verdaguer describes the Santuari de Bellmunt near Sant Pere de Torelló .
Web links
- 'L'Emigrant' sung by Montserrat Caballé (1987 at the ' Gran Teatre del Liceu ') on YouTube