Catalan musician Ramón Gener and his connection to the Teatro Colón: he is preparing a new novel about opera.

Communicatingmusic . Something seemingly so simple is often difficult to put into practice, especially when it comes to classical music, a genre that recent history has given an air of exclusivity that has little to do with its essence. For years (and with a background in Humanities and Business Administration, a past as a professional opera singer, and a pianistic background that allows him to travel the world and his pianos), Catalan composer Ramón Gener has managed, through illustrated talks, videos, columns in the media, material on social media , interviews , and countless events, to bring the legacy of great composers to new ears .

Although Gener's visit to Buenos Aires was specifically intended to present his first novel, Historia de un piano: 31887 (Destino), there was also another motivation: to gather first-hand information and, above all, to soak up the city's atmosphere. Gener is currently working on his next novel , which revolves around the Italian company that arrived from Genoa to perform at the Teatro Colón's second opera season in 1909.

–Was your trip for this presentation a coincidence?

–Yes. And when the opportunity to come arose, I thought about doing it first to personally meet all the people who are helping me, and because it's essential to get to know the places. I go with my little notebook, sit there, and draw things so I can be there, breathe them in, and then have a bit of truth in what I write.

As he enthusiastically recounts the plot of his forthcoming novel (a romance that begins on the ship that brings the company), Gener highlights the many ties between his life and Buenos Aires . Despite having spent only a few days on Argentine soil, the writer and popularizer confesses: “This is a country that creates a certain addiction. The musicality, the language, the fact that it's a people who repeatedly ask themselves the same questions. It's very addictive and very, very exciting.”

Other ties of fate bind him to the Colón Theater. One is his singing teacher, the soprano Victoria de los Ángeles, beloved and remembered by audiences who frequented the theater since the 1950s . Gener reached out to her unexpectedly, when a career as an opera singer wasn't in his plans. "Victoria appeared at exactly the right moment, told me what I needed to hear, and I spent many years with her," he recalls.

“And it was wonderful. If I write, it's also thanks to her, because she was the person who told me that music wasn't just music. Sometimes she would come to class and say, 'Today we're not going to sing, we're going to read Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair .' And I would think, 'What does this have to do with what we're doing?' At the time, I didn't understand anything. I just did it because she told me to. Later, over time, I understood everything. When she died, I realized that she saved my life in every way .”

The other link is the opera Billy Budd , currently being prepared at the auditorium on Libertad Street. It was precisely while singing a role in that opera, in a production at the Liceu in Barcelona (2001), that Gener realized his future didn't lie on those stages, or at least not in that way.

Observing the excellence yet nonchalance of Bo Skovhus, the great Danish baritone who played the protagonist, Gener realized he would never reach that level . “I realized that, as much as I loved singing and had staked everything on it, I wasn't going to be Messi. And I wanted to be Messi, I wanted to win the World Cup, and I realized that wasn't going to happen . And then everything else appeared, almost by chance, and I found myself on opera stages, not singing, but sitting at a piano explaining, and it turned out that was my thing,” he confesses.

Every pianist (professional, amateur, or in training) knows: in addition to being an instrument, a piano is a substantial part of the home, and the bond one develops with it entails a degree of intimacy in which the terms of the possessor-possessed relationship can be reversed . And, like few objects, a piano holds a story, the memory of each of the people who sat before it to transform the dead notes on paper into living music.

“You must accept a piano as you accept your destiny”; Sviatoslav Richter's phrase can also be applied to summarize the essence of The Story of a Piano : when you buy a piano, you are also acquiring a wealth of lives, memories, and ghosts that will inhabit the house.

The number that accompanies the title of the novel (31887) is neither more nor less than the serial number of Ramón Gener's piano, a Grotrian–Steinweg , but... how much of it is autobiographical in his story, which interweaves the lives of the successive owners of this piano in a path marked by wars and personal tragedies?

“There’s a part of reality and a part of fiction,” says Gener. “ When you start investigating an instrument, you find out some information, but others escape you, and that's where you introduce fiction. You learn that the piano was manufactured in this year in this factory, it was sold to someone else in 1915, the next piece of information is in 1920, the other is in 1940... There are a series of pieces of information, which are like the stations on a railroad. And what lies between the pieces of information is the tunnel to get from one station to the other. The stations are the information I have, what lies in between is the tunnel. And then the writer fills those tunnels with fiction to get to the next piece of information. I discovered that the piano was born in Germany in the middle of World War I, that a very special person had participated, that it had then gone to England, that it had passed through France... The piano finally arrives in Poland in a very magical way, which is naturally a fiction, and finally in Barcelona. But I discovered that the subject of the novel I had been trying to write for some time was in my house .”

–How did this piano come into your life?

"I bought it because it was the make and model I wanted. And when I managed to restore it, a whole series of elements appeared in the piano that gave me the opportunity to start investigating. Taking the car, going to Germany, asking questions, going to England, talking to people, checking archives, and trying to follow the story. Then reality always surpasses fiction, and you begin to guess a fascinating story. What I would like is for the piano to belong to everyone, and for someone to feel that when they read the novel, the piano also tells them something."

–Writing the novel was... “What to do with the piano?” That's why the novel has an epilogue, which is like a will: I am like the last link in the piano's chain, a knight who guards this Holy Grail that existed before I existed and will continue to exist after I cease to exist. And the will names an executor, Stefan Gritzka, who is the owner of the factory. But of course, it could happen that he dies before me. My hope is that everyone who reads the novel becomes an executor of the will. That everyone understands that in some way they assume responsibility for what I have put there ultimately happening to the piano.

Story of a piano: 31887 , by Ramón Gener (Destino).