Oratorio libretti in the CRAI Library of the University of Barcelona and their music

Thursday, March 12, 2026

The CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic at the University of Barcelona houses an extensive collection of libretti, including a group of 173 titles once performed in the Cathedral of Barcelona. However, the music associated with these texts is scattered across various libraries, some of them in Catalonia, and until recently a direct connection between the textual and musical sources could not be established in many cases. One notable exception is the oratorical output of Francesc Queralt, thoroughly examined by Xavier Daufí in his dissertation: Els oratorios des Francesc Queralt (1740-1825). Història de l’oratori a Catalunya al segle XVIII (Lledia 2004).

Any effort to reconstruct the relationship between a libretto and its musical setting raises various questions and problems, since the textual and the musical sources, respectively, often contain no clear references to each other. Therefore, their connection must be established through preliminary bibliographic enquiries enhanced by further analysis. It is usually information contained in the libretti themselves – especially the text incipits and the names of characters or actual persons – that allow for direct comparison with the corresponding information in the musical sources, and thereby clarifies the connection between them.

For the abovementioned 173 oratorio libretti from the CRAI Biblioteca de Fons Antic, this in-depth research was carried out by two students – Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado – of the Escola de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) as part of a three-month internship supervised by Neus Verger, head of the CRAI library, and Oriol Brugarolas, professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Barcelona. Their findings not only established the connection between several compositions and their respective libretti, but also clarified that, in some cases, the music for these libretti was composed by none other than Francesc Queralt. Last but not least, their investigations led to the (re)discovery of 18th-century Catalan composers such as Josep Pujol, whose biographical details remain largely unknown.

A detailed report by Linus Montolio and Antonio Cruzado was published in the Blog de Fons Antic.

To date, only a handful of works by Queralt and Pujol can be found in the RISM database. With that in mind, the cataloguing for RISM of the oratorio compositions identified in this project would be a most welcome and important addition.

Image: Queralt, Francesc: Oratorio de Sta. Ana (1778), Tiple 1.° Coro, p. 2, Biblioteca de Catalunya, M 1549/2. Available online (public domain).

Category: Rediscovered