Shadows in the luminous Victoria: “I'm dying of loneliness and I think it's almost my final moment.”

The private life of Victoria de los Ángeles (Barcelona, ​​1923-2005) is not and was not a trivial matter, but a reflection of the unfortunate emotional existence that so many women of her generation, opera divas or housewives, led in a Spain that was equally macho and Francoist, which often tied them sentimentally to an unfaithful husband who, to make matters worse, ignored them.

This is how it is presented in Victoria de los Ángeles. Everything seemed so simple (Ficta Edicions, in collaboration with Barcelona City Council), a biography by journalist and musicologist Pep Gorgori (Barcelona, ​​1977), which for the first time has given access to the singer's personal and professional documentation, once deposited in the National Archive of Catalonia. Gorgori received permission from the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation, but was free to use it without having to be held accountable. He has also supplemented it with thirty other archives about the soprano.

“I just want affection all the time and this has become a strange disease that will end badly.”

"It's not a biography based on her own account or that of the people who knew her, but rather is based primarily on the documentation I've been analyzing," Gorgori says. In his desire to portray the artist in all her facets, the journalist also paints a portrait of the period through the eyes of the subject, both in relation to the world of opera—with previously unpublished material—and her status as a woman.

It's no surprise that she cried on her wedding day. She knew she was making a mistake. Enrique Magriñá, who would instantly reveal José María Lamaña as her manager and ruin her, leaving unopened a large number of letters from theaters and agents demanding her, had five children out of wedlock. He appropriated Victoria's fees, put accounts and investments in her name. And while in 1968 she gave birth to her first child, Alejandro, who had Down syndrome, he named the daughter he had with his secretary Alejandra and eloped in 1970, leaving Victoria destitute, taking shares, royalties, etc.

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All of this and her artistic career were discussed a couple of years ago on the occasion of the centenary. “It was known that Victoria de los Ángeles had a rather sad personality and suffered a difficult marriage, but now we're discovering important details that had remained hidden. Like the fact that she suffered at least four miscarriages throughout her life and that it took her fifteen years after her marriage to have her first child. And that, at a time when there was social pressure for women to marry and become mothers, affects character. We can't underestimate those details. Nor can we underestimate her husband's infidelities and the financial disasters they caused: she experienced all of this as a betrayal and was one of the factors that led to her depression, as I have been able to document with this research.”

Now we read in his own hand the great shadow that weighed on that luminous figure. "I just want affection all the time, and this has become a strange illness, which I know will only end badly and quickly," we read in the letters he wrote between 1979 and 1982 to an interlocutor who wishes to remain anonymous.

“I've made a mistake in my life by wanting.” “All I can do is cry and cry, hiding my tears so the child doesn't find out, but wanting to go far away, up there, to that firmament we once spoke of... and disappear.” “I'm dying of loneliness, and I think I'm almost at the end of my rope.” “The sadness is infinite, the loneliness relentless, and I'll let it finish me off once and for all.”

The Life Victoria now concludes its 13th edition, a festival that has had freedom as its guiding theme, and in which there has been no shortage of the world's greats of lieder, with the voices of Günther Groissböck, Mark Padmore, Louise Adler or Mauro Peter on the piano of Julius Drake and Joseph Middleton, who will accompany the sought-after British baritone Huw Montague-Rendall on May 7, the Pelléas of his time, according to Le Figaro , who was seen in the Christmas Bat at the Liceu and who is making his Barcelona recital debut here. On the same day, the Life Victoria will be hosting the winner of the Xavier Montsalvatge Prize at the Concurs de Les Corts, the pianist Clara Santacana, who will be performing in the Alicia de Larrocha piano series at the Life Victoria. A recital that unites Victoria, Alicia and Xavier, three great names, three great friends. The closing ceremony of the festival will be on the 11th with soprano Serena Sáenz and pianist Rubén Fernández Aguirre in the brand-new Victoria de los Ángeles hall of the Auditori L'Illa de Les Corts. Meanwhile, the foundation that bears the singer's name has just concluded the second edition of Victoria Legacy at the Juilliard School in New York. This is a series of masterclasses dedicated to preserving and promoting the art of Catalan and Spanish song. This initiative was launched to commemorate the diva's centenary.

Young, beautiful, talented, and with a splendid career, going on stage feeling miserable didn't work in her favor vocally, as she confessed in a 1993 BBC interview. "I was one of those Spanish women who believes that fidelity exists. And then you discover it doesn't. It was very hard for me, and it was in the sixties, right around the time my first son was born. I took it very calmly, without any fanfare, I didn't kick him out or anything like that. I thought this would change. We continued touring. I looked the other way and kept it to myself. But I was so sad... I never wanted to admit it, but it took a big part of my career in the sixties and early seventies. It was the worst period of my singing. I could give a highly successful recital and three days later another that was a disaster. It even damaged my relationship with EMI. Between 1972 and 1975, I had to fight a lot against myself," she said.