Mallorca's Favourite Sons
Despite its relatively small size, Mallorca has produced some world famous artists, philanthropists and sportsmen - from Serra to March, to Nadal. In addition, many others have adopted Mallorca as their second home - Graves, Miro and Chopin are three that spring to mind. You can find out a little more about these persons in the following section.
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llul (1235-1316) was a wealthy courtier n Palma until a disastrous seduction attempt led him to retire to Puig de Randa in isolation. Devoting himself to prayer and study, he wrote in Catalan and Latin on every thing from algebra to metaphysics; he is widely seen as the father of the Catalan language Recalled to the court by Jaume II, he established an Oriental language school at Valldemossa and learnt Arabic with the help of a Moorish slave. He was stoned to death attempting to convert Muslims in Tunisia
Junipero Serra
The Mallorcan missionary, Junipero Serra (1713-84), is honoured in the Capitol in Washington as 'the founder of California'. Of course California was there already; but it was Serra, sent there at the age of 54 after 14 years in Mexico, who established the missions which have grown into some of Americans biggest cities, including San Diego and San Francisco. A museum in his home town of Petra tells the story. He was beatified in 1988, the first step on the road to sainthood.
Frédéric Chopin
Born Zelazowa Wola, 1 March 1810; died Paris, 17 October 1849
150 years ago, Chopin spent a winter in Mallorca (Valldemossa). During this time he wrote letters to his friends in Paris mentioning his love for the island, but also raving against the people living on the island. It is believe that he had a mistress "George Sand" here in Mallorca.
Extract from a letter sent to his friend Julio Fontana on the 15th of November, 1838;
My dear friend,
I'm in Palma, between Palma trees, cedar, aloe, orange, lemon, fig and pomegranate trees. The trees that will never grow in, The Garden of the Plants, there in Paris.
The sky is turquoise, the sea blue, the mountains emerald, and the air? The air is as blue as the sky. The sun shines all day and people are dressed as in the summer time, because here it is hot.
At night, for long hours, I can hear songs and music of guitars. The houses have large balconies from where the vines hang. The walls of the houses belong to the Arab domination and the city, as everything here reminds you of Africa.
The son of French émigré father (a schoolteacher working in Poland) and a cultured Polish mother, he grew up in Warsaw, taking childhood music lessons in Bach and the Viennese Classics from Wojciech Zywny and Jósef Elsner before entering the Conservatory (1826-9). By this time he had performed in local salons and composed several rondos, polonaises and mazurkas. Public and critical acclaim increased during the years 1829-30 when he gave concerts in Vienna and Warsaw, but his despair over the political repression in Poland, coupled with his musical ambitions, led him to move to Paris in 1831.
There, with practical help from Kalkbrenner and Pleyel, praise from Liszt, Fétis and Schumann and introductions into the highest society, he quickly established himself as a private teacher and salon performer. His legendary artist's image was enhanced by frail health (he had tuberculosis), attractive looks, sensitive playing, a courteous manner and the piquancy attaching to self-exile. Of his several romantic affairs, the most talked about was that with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dudevant) though whether he was truly drawn to women must remain in doubt. Between 1838 and 1847 their relationship, with a strong element of the maternal on her side, coincided with one of his most productive creative periods. He gave few public concerts, though his playing was much praised, and he published much of his best music simultaneously in Paris, London and Leipzig. The breach with Sand was followed by a rapid deterioration in his health and a long visit to Britain (1848). His funeral at the Madeleine was attended by nearly 3000 people.
No great composer has devoted himself as exclusively to the piano as Chopin and he was admired for his great originality. By all accounts an inspired improviser, he composed while playing, writing down his thoughts only with difficulty. While his own playing style was famous for its subtlety and restraint, its exquisite delicacy in contrast with the spectacular feats of pianism then reigning in Paris, most of his works have a simple texture of accompanied melody.
Joan Miró
Spanish painter, whose surrealist works, with their subject matter drawn from the realm of memory and imaginative fantasy, are some of the most original of the 20th century.
Miró was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona and studied at the Barcelona School of Fine Arts and the Academia Galí. His work before 1920 shows wide-ranging influences, including the bright colors of the Fauves, the broken forms of cubism, and the powerful, flat two-dimensionality of Catalan folk art and Romanesque church frescoes of his native Spain. He moved to Paris in 1920, where, under the influence of surrealist poets and writers, he evolved his mature style. Miró drew on memory, fantasy, and the irrational to create works of art that are visual analogues of surrealist poetry. These dreamlike visions, such as Harlequin's Carnival or Dutch Interior, often have a whimsical or humorous quality, containing images of playfully distorted animal forms, twisted organic shapes, and odd geometric constructions.
The forms of his paintings are organized against flat neutral backgrounds and are painted in a limited range of bright colors, especially blue, red, yellow, green, and black. Amorphous amoebic shapes alternate with sharply drawn lines, spots, and curlicues, all positioned on the canvas with seeming nonchalance. Miró later produced highly generalized, ethereal works in which his organic forms and figures are reduced to abstract spots, lines, and bursts of colors.
Miró also experimented in a wide array of other media, devoting himself to etchings and lithographs for several years in the 1950s and also working in watercolor, pastel, collage, and paint on copper and masonite. His ceramic sculptures are especially notable, in particular his two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris (Wall of the Moon and Wall of the Sun, 1957-59).
Miró died in Son Abrines, Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on December 25, 1983, after sending the rest of his later years on the Island. In 1992 the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró was established in Mallorca.
