Àngel Guimerà i Jorge (ˈaɲʒəɫ ɣiməˈɾa) (1845 - 1924) was a Spanish

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 Canarian

Canarian people

The Canarians are an ethnic group living in the archipelago of the Canary Islands , near the coast of Western Africa...

 writer

Writer

A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....

, born in Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the capital , second-most populous city of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands and the 21st largest city in Spain, with a population of 222,417 in 2009...

, Canary Islands

Canary Islands

The Canary Islands , also known as the Canaries , is a Spanish archipelago located just off the northwest coast of mainland Africa, 100 km west of the border between Morocco and the Western Sahara. The Canaries are a Spanish autonomous community and an outermost region of the European Union...

, to a Catalan father and a Canary islander mother. At an early age, Guimerà's family moved to Catalonia

Catalonia

Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...

, where they settled at his father's birthplace, El Vendrell

El Vendrell

El Vendrell is a town located in Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain, in a wine-growing region. It is wedged between the Mediterranean and the Litoral mountain ranges...

.

Guimerà wrote a number of popular plays

Play (theatre)

A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...

, which were translated into other languages and performed abroad, proving instrumental in the revival of Catalan as a literary language (Renaixença

Renaixença

The Renaixença was an early 19th century late romantic revivalist movement in Catalan language and culture, akin to the Galician Rexurdimento or the Occitan Félibrige movements. The first stimuli of the movement date of the 1830s and 1840s, but the Renaixença stretches up into the 1880s, until it...

) at the turn of the century

Turn of the century

Turn of the century, in its broadest sense, refers to the transition from one century to another. The term is most often used to indicate a non-specific time period either before or after the beginning of a century....

. By far the most famous was his realistic drama Terra baixa

Terra baixa

Terra baixa is a Catalan-language play written by Àngel Guimerà in 1896. The drama is considered his most popular work, having become an international sensation after its premiere. It served as the basis for an opera, Tiefland, by Eugen d'Albert, which in turn served as the basis for two films,...

(Lowlands, also translated as Martha of the Lowlands). Written in 1896, it quickly became an international sensation. The play was translated into 15 different languages and the Spanish translation was presented regularly for a period of thirty years by Enric Borràs's theatre throughout Spain

Spain

Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...

 and Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

. In English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, the play received three Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 productions between 1903 and 1936.

In addition to being a popular stage play, Terra baixa was made into six films, including a silent film in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, entitled "Martha of the Lowlands" (1914) and Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, actress and dancer widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens , a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party...

's Tiefland (1954). Furthermore, it served as the source material for two operas: Eugen d'Albert

Eugen d'Albert

Eugen Francis Charles d'Albert was a Scottish-born German pianist and composer.Educated in Britain, d'Albert showed early musical talent and, at the age of seventeen, he won a scholarship to study in Austria...

's German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 Tiefland

Tiefland

Tiefland may refer to:* Tiefland a 1903 opera by Eugen d'Albert* Tiefland , a 1954 film by Leni Riefenstahl...

(1903) and Fernand Le Borne's La Catalane (French). Playwright Àngel Guimerà was even nominated a record 17 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won, due to controversy about the political significance of the gesture. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

 in 1904, to be shared with the Provençal

Provençal language

Provençal is a dialect of Occitan spoken by a minority of people in southern France, mostly in Provence. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but it actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in Provence."Provençal" is also the...

 writer Frédéric Mistral

Frédéric Mistral

Frédéric Mistral was a French writer and lexicographer of the Occitan language. Mistral won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1904 and was a founding member of Félibrige and a member of l'Académie de Marseille...

, in recognition of their contributions to literature in non-official languages. Political pressure from Spain central government having made this prize impossible, it was eventually awarded to Mistral and to the Spanish language

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 playwright José de Echegaray.

When Guimerà died in 1924, he was offered a state funeral in Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...

 of a proportion which had never been seen before. In his hometown of Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the capital , second-most populous city of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands and the 21st largest city in Spain, with a population of 222,417 in 2009...

 is a theater built in his name (Teatro Guimerá

Teatro Guimerá

Teatro Guimerá is a theatre located in the capital city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands is the oldest theater in the Canary Islands.Founded in the 19th century...

).

Terra Baixa

Terra baixa

Terra baixa

Terra baixa is a Catalan-language play written by Àngel Guimerà in 1896. The drama is considered his most popular work, having become an international sensation after its premiere. It served as the basis for an opera, Tiefland, by Eugen d'Albert, which in turn served as the basis for two films,...

is the story of Martha, a poor girl from Barcelona, who finds herself the young lover to Sebastià, the most important landowner in the Catalan lowlands. Sebastià must marry a woman of prominence to keep his land and inheritance. To squelch gossip of his relationship with Martha but still keep her as his lover, Sebastià marries her off to the unsuspecting Manelic, a young shepherd from the Pyrenees, and sets the newly weds up in the house attached to the town's mill. Martha finds herself torn between her old domineering lover and her new caring husband.

La Filla del Mar

Another well-known work by Guimerà is the play La filla del mar (The daughter of the sea, 1900), that recounts the story of Agata (Agate).

Her name is that of a precious stone, in sharp contrast to the contempt in which she is held.

Her uncertain origins, and the fact that she had been born «among Moors» renders her an object of hate, branded as a heretic.

One of the few people who does not exclude her is Baltasanet, who states that “When we are born, we are all Moors”. Agata is perfectly conscious of the fact that she is considered a “nobody” and a “nuisance”. «What evil have I done, that everyone despises me?», she asks. The discrimination she faces leads ultimately to her death.

Agata feels attracted by the sea, which seems to be calling out to her, in the voices of her parents.

For her there is a symbolic opposition between sea and earth, the latter being all about misery and tears, whereas the sea harbours peacefulness and truth. Drowning, for her, would be a return to the ‘amniotic fluid’ of the sea from which she was born.

Like a sailor, she is strong, brave, and vital. At the same time she is sensitive, and when she finds in Pere Màrtir the affection she had desperately lacked, they are able to connect. She excuses his past as a ladies’ man, but, overcome by jealousy, threatens him with death if he relapses.

The story of Àgata involves numerous literary allusions and archetypes, from mythological aquatic characters, to the legend of Sappho committing suicide by throwing herself from a cliff into the sea. < Diccionari de la Literatura Catalana, 2008 >

External links

• Àngel Guimerà in LletrA, Catalan Literature Online (Open University of Catalonia)
• Liebesketten an opera by Eugen d'Albert based on Guimera's La filla del mar, translated by Rudolf Lothar; Score from Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection