Barcelona celebrates its favourite son with an opera 12 years late

An eagerly-awaited opera that celebrates the life of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi finally opened in Barcelona this week, 12 years after it was originally scheduled.

Gaudi's monastic and unspectacular life might seem to be unprepossessing opera material, but the opening night audience at the Liceu opera house on Wednesday seemed as impressed by the sets as by the music. Video projections of Gaudi's futuristic visions dominated the stage, while incense filled the house with what one reviewer described as "a peculiar aroma of the church".

Surprisingly for a man Catalans consider their hero - indeed his supporters are pressing for the modernist architect to be made a saint - the leading man was an American, Robert Bork. But he took an intensive course in Catalan to do justice to Barcelona's favourite son.

The work concentrates on Gaudi's final days, when he lay in hospital after having been knocked over in the street by a tram in 1926, and was mistaken for a vagrant because of the rags he was wearing.

Gaudi reviews his life in flashback, or as the authors have it, "in an interior journey". The problem is the lack of people in his life. The vibrant sensuality of Gaudi's buildings stands in stark contrast to his boring and uneventful life, in which his indifference to women and sex prompted many to suspect him of suppressed homosexuality.

So the characters in the opera - just four of them apart from the star - are invented. They represent archetypes of the people Gaudi dealt with in the course of his career: his patron, a female client, his assistant and his craftsman.

A high point of the show is a full-scale ballet of 17 dancers who perform a work called "Trencadis", which is the Catalan word for the distinctive broken pottery that Gaudi made famous as a decoration for his sinuous buildings.

The dancers form and reform different patterns accompanied by a kaleidoscopic light show, symbolising not only a defining motif of Gaudi's work but also how he reassembled the fragments of his life after a crisis when he despaired of finishing his beloved Sagrada Familia church.

"I'm not sure to what extent we can consider Gaudi as a theatrical character," admitted the opera's composer, Joan Guinjoan, speaking before this week's premiere.''

He added: "In reality he is one of those personalities who becomes transcendent above all for his work rather than his life."

Gaudi the opera has been a long time coming, falling victim to almost as many delays and obstacles as the still-incomplete Sagrada Familia that has since become the internationally recognised symbol of Barcelona.

The work was originally commissioned for the Barcelona Olympics of 1992, but missed the deadline. Then the librettist Josep Maria Carandell died. Then the Liceu burnt down and took years to be rebuilt, and the 2002 Gaudi year celebrations came and went.

Wednesday's opening was therefore an emotional occasion, but few theatrical spectacles match the operatic grandeur of the buildings themselves.