Extraordinary Centenary Recital

In the same place and on the same day, but one hundred years later, this is how the centenary of Victoria de los Ángeles will begin: at the University of Barcelona on 1 November 2023, on the exact anniversary of her birth. Years after that 1923, on 23 December 1987, Victoria de los Ángeles was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University that saw her birth, a recognition she treasured as one of the most important of her life. On that same occasion, she explained that she was very moved because she learned to sing in that paranimf as a child, on a dilapidated piano while her mother scrubbed the floors of this enormous assembly hall. On that solemn occasion, she wanted the music to speak more than words and thus offered a beautiful recital that remained in the city's musical memory. “It was like a fairy tale, I, the daughter of the University employee who has become an honorary doctor,” she said in an interview. “For me, the University was a city, and the city outside was another city,” Victoria used to say, and this space always accompanied her throughout her life, as she acknowledged on numerous occasions, even being present during her debut at Bayreuth; when the curtain rose to perform ‘Dich, teure Halle’ from Tannhäuser, the paranimf of her home came to mind: the University of Barcelona.