Victoria & The University

In the same place and on the same day, but one hundred years later, this is how the centenary of Victoria de los Ángeles will begin: at the University of Barcelona, on 1 November 2023, on the exact birthday of her birth. Years after that 1923, on 23 December 1987, Victoria de los Ángeles was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University where she was born, a recognition she treasured as one of the most important of her life. On that same occasion she explained that she was very moved because she learned to sing in that auditorium when she was a little girl, on a crazy piano while her mother scrubbed the floors of this enormous assembly hall. On that solemn occasion she wanted the music to speak louder than words and so she gave a beautiful recital that remained in the musical memory of the city.

"It was like a fairy tale, I was the daughter of a university employee who had become a doctor honoris causa," she said in an interview. "For me the University was a city, and the city outside was another city," said Victoria, and this space always accompanied her throughout her life, as she acknowledged on numerous occasions, even being present at her debut in Bayreuth, when the curtain rose to perform 'Dich, teure Halle' from Tannhäuser, and the auditorium of her home, the University of Barcelona, came to her mind.

Recital organised by the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation