A new organ in the Basilica of La Mercè

Barcelona will unveil a new organ for the 2018 La Mercè festival (the city’s main festival). People will be able to see and hear it in the Basilica of the city’s patron saint, and its inauguration will coincide with the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mercedarian Order.

The Basilica’s current organ was designed in 1940 by Gaietà Estadella, who died in 1944 before he could finish it. To this day it remains unfinished, which makes it unusable for concerts, and its role in liturgical celebrations is limited. However, a buyer is being sought, since it’s an instrument that, with some adaptation, could work perfectly well in another space.

With a new organ at La Mercè, Barcelona will have a benchmark instrument, unique in the city. It will be the first large organ that the prestigious master organ builder Gerhard Grenzing has built in Barcelona. It will also help to recover the organ heritage that the Catalan capital lost when churches were destroyed during the Tragic Week (Semana Trágica) and the Civil War. Barcelona had been a city with a strong organ tradition, which has gradually been recovering in recent years.

The La Mercè organ will benefit from the acoustics of the basilica that houses the image of Barcelona’s patron saint, and it will incorporate the latest advances in organ building. Once it’s finished, it will be possible to perform and hear works by composers as different as Bach, Liszt and Messiaen, and to keep up a regular programme of music open to the public.

The instrument will have three manuals and a pedalboard, with approximately 3,000 pipes spread across 42 different stops (the project is still open and may grow during construction).

In this way, the La Mercè organ will serve both for regular worship and liturgical services and for holding major concerts that add to the city’s cultural life.

The planned work will respect the configuration of the organ case, with some aesthetic and musical improvements (for example, pipes will be visible across the whole façade, whereas now they can only be seen in the side towers). Consideration is being given to whether to keep the colour of the current organ, which was changed in the 1940s, or to go back to the light colour of the instrument destroyed during the Civil War.

The new La Mercè organ will be made possible thanks to the support of the ‘la Caixa’ Banking Foundation and a patronage campaign in which people can sponsor pipes and so, symbolically, make the organ their own. The ‘la Caixa’ Banking Foundation is contributing €670,000. The rest, some €300,000, will come from private donors, who will be able to sponsor the pipe of their choice from the 3,000 the instrument will have.

The façade pipes, which are on view, will bear the name of their sponsor, while the full list of patrons will be displayed on one side of the organ. In addition, all the names will be included in a ‘time capsule’ that will be hidden inside the structure of the instrument after the inauguration, so that it can only be found when the organ is restored decades or centuries from now. This capsule will contain the list of patrons, along with other documents relating to the organ’s construction.