Joan Viladomat, universal composer and teacher of “cuplé” singers (a journey to the decadent 1920s Barcelona)

Jaume Collell

Spanish neutrality during the First World War favoured the rapid enrichment of a productive economy that would contribute to the birth of an authentic theatre industry that had its golden moments during the frenzy experienced by Barcelona in the 1920s. The popular stages, together with the emergence of a radio and cinema industry, participated in the definition of a new city model to establish the recent paradigms of a mass culture that even today explains our most immediate reality.

Joan Viladomat had the foresight to immortalise that atmosphere of cafés, cars, worker’s caps, champagne and cocaine in his songs, with titles that would go around the world, such as Fumando espero and theTango de la cocaína. In Conde del Asalto Street – now Nou de la Rambla Street – he opened the variety theatre school “La Colosal”, which would become known as “the Ford of the cuplés” because of the extraordinary number of girls that every year passed through it with the hope of making their fortune in the world of Catalan show business.

There are still the schools. In Nou de la Rambla and its adjoining streets. They are at the end of a dark passage, in a basement. Walking along this street, in the middle of the afternoon, you’ll hear the loud sound of a piano, the clicking of castanets and a thin voice going out of tune. There is a stage leaning against a wall and packets of music on the floor. Portraits of cuplé singers and dancers, with spelling mistakes, hanging on the walls. And many programmes.
They teach the craft there; the cuplé or the latest dance are manufactured there. One of the most reputable is that of maestro Viladomat who, a few years ago, was a maker of successes. He is the creator of the famous Les campanes foxtrot and of the Tango de la cocaína. The cuplé singers attend his school to revise the cuplés; the dancers, the dances. They take away the latest novelties, if there are any. Maestro Viladomat is a man capable of making a maid covered with facial hair and blackheads into a shining star with just a couple of lessons.

(Jaume Passarell, “Del cafè concert primitiu a les acadèmies de varietés”, Mirador, 9th April 1931)