Accompanying this month’s blog is an image of Omniscience 1994 by Remco de Fouw from the Arts Council Collection. Made in copper and sprinkler fittings, the sculpture is remarkably similar in form to the Orsini bombs used to attack the Gran Teatre del Liceu and evokes the disruption which befell the opera house in 1893. In Omniscience the supposed comfort and protection of sprinkler heads are used to dramatically form the surrounds of a bomb containing all of the inherent threat and tension carried therein.

When I went to Barcelona in 1975 there were two venues for classical music. One was the Palau de la Mùsica Catalana, a magnificent, almost outlandishly ornate concert hall created in an Art Nouveau style called Modernisme at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although weeknight concerts, with some of the greatest performers in the world, could be expensive and exclusive, tickets for the city’s symphony orchestra concerts on Saturday evening, and repeated on Sunday morning, were cheap. 

These usually began with some orchestral suites and ended with a major symphony or concerto, favouring Brahms, Schumann, Schubert symphonies and concertos by Brahms or Beethoven or Mozart.

But just before the interval each week something interesting happened. They programmed a short piece by a young, contemporary Catalan composer. He or she was often in the audience, accompanied by a proud family and loyal friends.

One Saturday in 1977, according to my diary, it was a piano piece, fresh from a modern Catalan composer. I noted: ‘The pianist, who has played all over the world, came out, to applause, and sat down. She did nothing. She stretched and yawned and turned the sheet music upside down, or else put it the right way up. (Later, I learned that this was part of the composition.) She then stood and peered deep into the stringed body of the piano. She plucked a string and then another. No melody emerged, no tune. Just two disparate notes. 

‘There was a frightened silence in the hall. What would she do next? What the great pianist did next was she stood up and gave the side of the piano a good hard slap and then sat down again. And then she plucked a few more strings and slapped the piano one more time and then once again, this time with ferocious energy and abandon. And then there was vigorous applause. It had ended.

‘I think these Catalans are very advanced. Or else they are all friends of the composer or the pianist.’

One Saturday evening in that same 1977 in that very same concert hall something quite significant occurred. The printed programme was entirely in Catalan. The previous week, it had been available only in Spanish. I was fascinated not only by the change but by the lack of fuss, no transition to a dual-language edition, no announcement.

At the interval, I asked an usher if there was a copy of the programme in Spanish as well as in Catalan. She seemed puzzled and went away, returning accompanied by an officious-looking young man who asked me in Catalan if I was the person seeking a copy of the programme in Spanish. For a moment, as he and the usher studied me, I might have been a representative of one of the many enemies of the Catalan people. So, I explained quickly that I was perfectly happy with my Catalan-language programme but I was keeping a diary about change and I wanted to note this big change in the diary. The officious-looking young man peered at me, unconvinced.

This change, clearly, had not happened by accident. It was a small, interesting way in which the outside world made its way into the life of the concert hall. The dictator was dead and the Catalan language was slowly becoming an official language

Politics came to the other music venue, the Liceu opera house, in a different way. In 1893, an anarchist threw two large bombs – known as Orsini bombs, they were like large grenades with spikes – into the stalls – the expensive seats - of the Liceu during a performance of Rossini’s ‘William Tell’, killing twenty and injuring many more. Because one of the bombs did not explode, it was photographed and put on show, thus putting the further fear of God into people.  

The Liceu was privately owned. The old rich families of Barcelona held shares in the building. On opening nights, crowds gathered to watch as the owner-class came in their chauffeur-driven cars and all their finery. While the death of the dictator in November 1975 changed many things, it seemed not to make any difference to the shareholders of the Liceu and to the spectacle they created on these opening nights.

Tickets for the operas were prohibitively expensive. The first time I tried, it was a disaster. When I showed my ticket – for Puccini’s ‘La Boheme’ with Montserrat Caballé - at the front door, I was directed to another door, less grand and auspicious, to the side. From there began a set of stairs that rose endlessly and grew narrower as they got higher. When, eventually, I found my seat, I discovered that I had no view at all of the stage, none. Standing up would not help, because there was not enough head-room to stand up. Soon, others arrived and took up the seats around me.  

I grew sad when the music began in the sure knowledge that the stage must be bathed in beautiful light and the costumes must be gorgeous and the set superbly crafted. The real problem, however, arose in Act 4. I could not bear it any longer as Mimi sang her farewell. I had paid my money, I needed to see what was happening on the stage. I could hear the singing and the orchestra clearly as a hungry person can smell food. 

I felt a rat-like determination to see Caballé just once. Just once. I waited until a soaring moment, Caballé’s voice as its most splendid, and I not only leaned out, but rested my two hands on the shoulder of each of the two men in front of me and I propelled myself forward like a duck. That allowed me to catch a glimpse of the stage, just one glimpse, just for one second.

The men whose shoulders had thus been used went crazy. But, by that time, I had retreated into my cage, the place from where I could hear but not see. The problem was that my leaning had been less gentle than I had planned. I had clearly ruined the experience of a great high note for two members of the audience who had paid more money than I had. 

And now they knew where I was.

When the opera ended, I did not wait for the applause. I needed to get out of that building before anyone reported me to the police.

In 1994, when the opera house burned down it was re-built using public money. It was no longer owned by a consortium of the rich. To justify the use of tax-payer’s funds, an advertising campaign began using a single slogan over and over: ‘El Liceu es per tots.’ (‘The Liceu is for everyone.’) For some reason, this worked. Ordinary music-lovers in the city saw no reason why they too should not attend the Liceu.

I covered the re-opening of the refurbished opera house for BBC radio and noted how determined the publicists were that the whole world would know that the day of the rich families was over. One of them followed me around for two days making sure that I said this regularly into my microphone.

Each year after that, booking for the whole year ahead began in late July. Tickets would be sold out in a few hours. 

In 2007, at the Liceu, I should have been listening intently to Deborah Voigt and José Cura in a production of André Chenier in the Liceu. I was on my own, sitting downstairs at the front of one of the little boxes. The view was perfect. But as soon as the lights went down, I started to think about something else. No matter what I did, my mind wandered. I had written the opening of a new novel – the book that became ‘Brooklyn’ - but was unsure what might happen after the first chapter. Slowly, in the dark - the brilliant, dramatic singing as a kind of backdrop - the novel unfolded, almost all of it. It was surprising in how much detail it came. 

And why there? Why that night? By the time the opera ended, I had the novel. All I needed to do now was to write it.

In the spring of this year, I saw that Bob Dylan was to play in the Liceu in June, and I got tickets.

What struck me first an hour before the concert in the upstairs bar is how old we all are. Or: everyone else looked old and I suppose I must be old too. 

The first Dylan albums I heard were in the late sixties when a friend in Enniscorthy acquired LPs of ‘John Wesley Harding’ and ‘Nashville Skyline’, and then later in Barcelona in 1976 and 1977 when there was a copy of a Greatest Hits double album in a flat I was living in. My Catalan friends really knew these songs and cared about them. 

What is strange is that I missed out on everything between ‘Blood on the Tracks’ (1975) and ‘Oh Mercy’ (1989). I must have been thinking about something else. And I must have been dozing at the Dylan concert in Slane that I went to in 1984. Later, when I grew to love some of the songs from that period, I got to know them one by one, rather than as tracks from an album. It is only recently, for example, I have got to know ‘Changing of the Guards’, which is on the ‘Street Legal’ album from 1978.                     

I think I like the lyrics of that song as much as I do ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and ‘Farewell Angelina’. Some of the lines in these three songs sound like something that came raw into Dylan’s head. Because his head is a place filled with rich echo and intricate mischief, the images in these songs sound urgent most of the time, almost true.

Sometimes, Dylan appears to pick words because of their sound. Perhaps the only advantage of the word ‘chimes’ is that it rhymes with ‘rhymes’ and with ‘times’. Thus, his sad-eyed lady has a voice ‘like chimes’ and his ‘Changing of the Guards’ has ‘the wailing of chimes.’ He also loves an ingenious rhyme, such as matching ‘lowlands’ with ‘no man comes’, knowing that his style of singing will fill in whatever is missing in the echoing sound.

Some of his images are filled with mystery. In ‘Changing of the Guards’, after many moments of pure obscurity, we get ‘And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating.’ In ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, there is a lovely willful listing of qualities that sound right but make no sense. And then there is: ‘And your saintlike face and your ghostlike soul’. Dylan enjoys sounding like an ardent lover and a high priest rolled into one.

In these three songs, the energy often comes also from surreal sources, as though Dylan is dreaming or he is high, and registering how skewed and weird and oddly exciting everything seems.  But ‘my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums’ in ‘Sad-eyed Lady’, or ‘She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo/ A messenger arrived with a black nightingale’ in ‘Changing of the Guards’, or ‘King-kong, little elves and the rooftops they dance’ in ‘Angelina’, are all beyond me. But I like the obscurity, the irrationality, all carried towards meaning by the melody. 

These are not poems, although they take as much as they need from poetry; rather, they are ironic words for songs, and they take as much license as they require. They manage to sound throwaway and deadly earnest at the same time. We listen to the undercurrent of dark, sly laughter coming to the surface to match the high-toned gravity.  

Dylan’s album ‘Good as I Been to You’ appeared for Christmas in 1992. I wore it out as I did an earlier Dylan album which I acquired around this time – ‘Self Portrait’. And there is a version of ‘Pretty Saro’ that was recorded for that album but not included that I love. And then in the autumn 2006 I found myself in Texas. And I was driving a PT Cruiser. (I never worked out why everyone laughed when I mentioned this.) And each time I drove – and I drove a lot in Texas – I started with the same song. Month after month. It is called ‘Working Man’s Blues #2’ from the album ‘Modern Times’. The voice is gravelly and weary. I am glad that one critic called it ‘heartbreakingly romantic’. I didn’t know that one line (‘No one can ever claim that I took up arms against you.’) is taken directly from Ovid’s Tristia or that the song uses the same chord patterns as Pachebel’s Canon in D.

In the days before the event in Barcelona in June I looked at the setlist for the concerts Bob Dylan was doing in other European cities. And as I began to listen to these new songs and look at the lyrics, I decided to feel nothing but disdain for those who wished Dylan would sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, ‘Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man’ and ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ and loads of his other best-known hits.

The Liceu was packed for the second of his two Barcelona concerts.

When the lights went down and the music started, I didn’t realize at first that Dylan himself was actually on the stage. The piano he was standing at faced inwards; the lights never came up fully. When it was clear it was Dylan himself, a sort of hush went through the opera house, not a gasp, but a sense of wonder that it was him. I felt this too, but I hadn’t felt it in Slane in 1984. I wonder what has happened in the meantime. And I wonder who else I might feel this sort of awe about. 

Some of the songs he sang that night - such as ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’, ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ and ‘To Be Alone With You’ - were old Dylan songs, but many were from his new album ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’. The voice was raspy, growly, but with a bleak and melancholy edge. He seemed to favour short two and three syllable phrases as though he had found a more comfortable beat for his voice than the longer line in a four-line stanza. His voice followed clipped speech or maybe a moment of thought. There was no point in letting the melody or the tone of Dylan’s singing do the emotional work for you, the words mattered. He was singing the words.

And these were words written in the American grain, with echoes of blues songs and beat poems. In ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’, for example Dylan invoked ‘Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac’, but in the line ‘Hibiscus flowers, they grow everywhere here,’ he was also invoking Wallace Stevens, who wrote a famous poem ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, but also other poems set in Key West, such as ‘Of Mere Being’:

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze décor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

That is a late poem, written when Stevens was in his seventies, but it has much in common with an early Stevens poem ‘Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores,’ whose last ten lines could easily be adapted by Dylan – with some rhymes added, and heavy percussion between the phrases – and made into another song about Key West:

Then it was that monstered moth

Which had lain folded against the blue

And the coloured purple of the lazy sea,

And which had drowned along the bony shores,

Shut to the blather that the water made,

Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red

Dabbled with yellow pollen – red as red

As the flag above the old café –

And roamed there all the stupid afternoon.

Stevens didn’t bother much with facts. When he opened his poem ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ with ‘She sang beyond the genius of the sea,’ he expected us to assent to his tone and not ask who ‘she’ was precisely or how she could sing in this way or what exactly was ‘the genius of the sea.’ So, too, in Dylan’s ‘Key West’ song, we are not meant to ask how Dylan, born in 1941, could possibly have heard the news of the assassination of President McKinley, which happened in 1901, on the radio. It is part of the song.

Stop thinking. Listen to the song.

But this would be a mistake. In the Bob Dylan Review in the summer of 2021 there is an essay by Jim Salvucci called ‘Bob Dylan and Wallace Stevens in Conversation’ which deals with the problem of anachronism in this song: ‘Could Dylan be guilty of a careless anachronism? Many others have noted that the first line of Dylan’s song (“McKinley hollered – McKinley squalled”) quotes the opening line of “White House Blues” by Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, first recorded in 1926...Poole’s song cleverly tells the story not of McKinley’s life and assassination but of his final days lingering with the fatal consequences of two bullet wounds. Thus, when Dylan’s narrator states, “I heard all about it – he was going down slow / Heard it on the wireless radio,” he is not referring to the breaking news of McKinley’s murder but to hearing the song “White House Blues” itself playing on the radio.’

These are the things you need to know. My problem is that this concert happened only once. When it was over, I had to go. Towards the end, Dylan moved to stage right, gave up hiding behind the piano, and he acknowledged the band name by name. It was good to see him. 

I looked around the Liceu and then up into the higher tiers from where the man threw the bomb in 1893. I even looked at the chair where most of the novel ‘Brooklyn’ came to me over three hours in 2007. But no ghosts appeared. What occurred to me instead was how unlikely it would have seemed when I came here first in 1975 that I would come here again forty-eight years later to see Bob Dylan and a band play these strange, late songs. But that thought didn’t last for long. It was still early; still almost bright. Out on the street, Barcelona was getting ready for another rough and rowdy Saturday night.

Colm Tóibín (July 2023)