Jordi Savall

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“We firmly believe,” writes Stefan Zweig in Das Geheimnis künstlerischen Schaffens (The Secret of Artistic Creation), “that the principal enemies of humanity – ignorance, hatred and egoism – can only be combatted through love, knowledge, empathy and understanding; is that not the ultimate purpose of art and thinking?” This has always been Jordi Savall’s credo. He epitomises the revival of early music and “historically informed performance practice.” He is a gamba player, choir and orchestra conductor, ensemble founder, record label and festival director, educator, researcher and composer, and thus plays a leading role in the international cultural scene. Seen from today’s perspective, this role seems self-evident, exemplary and inevitable, but it was by no means a given. Like all great lives, Jordi Savall’s journey has been a long one, marked by coincidences and obstacles, guided by good spirits, always driven by a thirst for discovery, by perseverance and by sheer hard work.

His full surname is Savall i Bernadet, and he comes from Igualada, a small town in Catalonia between Montserrat and Tarragona, sixty kilometres northwest of Barcelona. At the time of his birth, Igualada’s main industries were leather and clothing. Jordi was born on 1 August 1941 into a Republican family of modest means, in an environment marked by the Civil War and social division. His first contacts with music were the lullabies and melodies his mother sang to him, followed by his participation in the school choir directed by Joan Just i Bertrand (1897–1960) from the age of six to thirteen – a decisive phase in his education. Making music together with other children quickly became a fundamental need. Paradoxically, it was a first distressing event that led him to continue along this path: at the age of eleven, he contracted typhoid fever and for a long period remained confined to his bed, with only books and a small radio for company. It was during this time that he discovered Jules Verne, Pushkin, Beethoven, Brahms and many others – whetting an appetite that remains keen to this day. “That’s when I realised what I really needed to survive,” he says.

At thirteen, Jordi completed his general education – at the same time his voice broke – and continued his studies of music (theory, harmony, composition) at the Conservatory of Igualada with Joan Just i Bertrand, discovering new musical worlds from Johann Sebastian Bach to George Gershwin and giving all genres and instruments a try. Then came a day that stood out from all the rest: Jordi did not attend his usual classes at the conservatory, but instead sneaked into a rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem with the Schola Cantorum of Igualada and a string quartet conducted by his teacher. The beauty of music touched him “at my very core.” He told himself, “If music can move us this deeply, then I want to become a musician,” and immediately decided to learn the cello.

Jordi spoke not a word about this revelation and took himself off to Barcelona to buy a cello. He practised alone in his room in secret, discovering both the instrument and its repertoire. For the first time in his life, at the age of fourteen, he felt “at home.” Mark Twain was right to say, “the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Jordi had now found his “why.” And why precisely this instrument, the cello? Because it is closest to the human voice and touches the heart directly.

Two years later, he felt ready to study at the Conservatori Superior del Liceu in Barcelona. He was interested in early music, particularly in the Renaissance composer Diego Ortiz, and from 1960 onwards continued studying the cello with José Trotta Millán (1906–1979) and chamber music with Joan Massià i Prats (1890–1969) – two great Catalan musicians of the outstanding generation of Pablo Casals. He met Casals himself in Prades in 1963, at the end of his studies: “I was deeply impressed,” says Savall, “by his phenomenal vitality and his way of approaching music, especially his keen sense of detail. With Casals, the music was alive, full of an incomparable richness and radiation – that was the word he himself used. His entire art was focused on bringing the sound to the listener. A superb lesson.” New questions arose for Jordi: why make music at all? How to achieve a compelling result that touches people directly? Can music enrich life – and if so, how? At the same time, Jordi Savall joined a group of young intellectuals and artists led by the poet and cultural activist Antoni Pous i Argila (1932–1976). In the middle of Franco’s dictatorship, they studied and translated works by Herbert Marcuse (The Affirmative Character of Culture), Lincoln Barnett, Antonio Gramsci, Georges Friedmann, Franz Kafka, Herman Broch and more, publishing them in the journal Els Quaderns del Lacetania (1962–1965). This intense experience had a lasting impact on him.

After graduating in June 1965, Jordi took part in a course in Santiago de Compostela, where he honed his chamber music skills with the harpsichordist Rafael Puyana (1931–2013). At the end of the course, Puyana approached him: “Why are you playing all this early music for viola da gamba on the cello?” Jordi had seen viols in museums, but had never imagined that they could still be played. He wrote in his notebook: “look for a viola da gamba.” Another stroke of luck: arriving home, he found a message from Enric Gispert, director of Ars Musicæ, the early music ensemble founded in Barcelona in 1935. They urgently needed a professional gamba player for a recording they were making for EMI with the soprano Victoria de los Ángeles.

Gispert (1925–1990) had heard about Jordi through another student at the conservatory, the singer Montserrat Figueras – who later became Jordi’s wife and mother of his two children, Arianna and Ferran. She had not actually met Jordi yet, but liked the way he played Bach on the cello and believed he could easily get used to the viola da gamba. Thus Jordi was offered a viol and everything started all over again: he examined the instrument on his own, trying to understand it, experimented and quickly found a good approach. A year later, he gave his first concert on this viol in Barcelona, playing early repertoire. In what could be seen as another coincidence, Wieland Kuijken, trailblazer of the viola da gamba renaissance and three years Jordi’s senior, was on tour in Barcelona at this time and attended Jordi’s concert. Contact was established and the exchange between the two pioneers began.

Equally crucial was Savall’s encounter with the musical sources, the manuscripts. Jordi spent some time working at the National Library in Paris, where he discovered Marin Marais, Couperin, Forqueray, Le Labyrinthe, Les Folies d’Espagne, Les Voix humaines and more besides. He had not anticipated the beauty of the scores, and it moved him deeply. His discoveries at the Royal Library in Brussels and the British Museum were equally significant: music by Thomas Hume, William Byrd, works for viol consort… Jordi spent just a few days researching and realised what a vast trove of forgotten treasures he had stumbled upon. He thus felt compelled to devote himself first and foremost to the viola da gamba and its repertoire, which had been slumbering in the archives and libraries for so long.

For three years, Savall worked with copies of the original scores, studying letters, texts and treatises from the period. He was convinced that the viol ought not to be played like a cello, but that the instrument had be rediscovered on its own terms. To do so, he had to complete his training, and here he had another stroke of luck: through the Goethe Institut in Barcelona, whose director was very fond of early music, he came into contact with August Wenzinger (1905–1996), the eminent teacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Jordi was awarded a scholarship and moved to Switzerland in February 1968. He arrived at his first lesson with Wenzinger carrying facsimiles of Forqueray’s correspondence, treatises and the most important pieces of music for the viola da gamba, and asked Wenzinger to help him develop a style of viol playing similar to that of Marin Marais or Antoine Forqueray – for example, placing the finger on the hair of the bow instead of on the wood, letting the hand follow the arm with a flexible wrist and not the other way around, and so forth. Together they tried out what worked – and what did not. Jordi consolidated this new style of playing and completed his studies in 1970.

A few months later, he was invited to perform Bach’s three sonatas with Rafael Puyana at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Soon afterwards, he was playing well-nigh everywhere with ensembles such as Gustav Leonhardt’s La Petite Bande and the Kuijken brothers, Trevor Pinnock’s English Consort, Michel Piguet’s Ricercare Ensemble and other groups, including in Germany. “Word of mouth” worked, and Savall’s name got around. He continued to practise tirelessly: eight hours a day, come what might. As he had started playing the cello late, he wanted to make up for lost time. To combat stage fright, the “fear of risk,” he took up meditation – a practice he was never to abandon henceforth. “The joy of music is…the soul’s delight in being invited…to recognize itself in the body,” Claude Lévi-Strauss writes in The Naked Man. Jordi Savall embodies this principle to the very highest degree.

In 1973, he applied for a teaching position at the Schola and was offered the job thanks to the deciding vote of the jury’s president Nikolaus Harnoncourt, cellist, gamba player, conductor – and already a major figure in early music at that time. Harnoncourt recognised that Savall was a born teacher and artist who, like himself, approached music with both flair and rigour, without forgetting imagination, emotion and freedom. Savall did not have many resources at his disposal; concerts were not enough to live on, so this teaching position was a real blessing.

During this time, Rafael Puyana organised a concert with Jordi in Paris for Countess Geneviève de Chambure, curator of the Conservatoire de Paris’s museum of musical instruments, who was a musicologist specialising in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a collector of antique instruments, scores and works on music. After the concert, she said to Jordi: “Young man! You play very well, but you have a very poor instrument!” A few months later, she suggested he play a concert featuring works by Marin Marais and Sainte-Colombe – and offered him one of her late seventeenth-century viols. With this instrument, all the historical references to gamba playing that he had attempted to learn so laboriously for seven years – playing “on air” (strokes that allow time for the string to vibrate), a flexible playing style, arpeggios, smoothness and precision – suddenly became much clearer and easier to implement. Soon Jordi bought his own instruments. In the meantime, he was giving more and more viol concerts.

After one of these, Michel Bernstein (1931–2006) approached him, explaining that he was a record producer, was founding a new series called Astrée, and wanted to make recordings with Jordi. There was an instant understanding between the two. Once again, fate had come knocking on the right door! After ten years of intensive work on the viola da gamba, Savall recorded the first part of Le Parnasse de la Viole in December 1975, dedicated to Couperin. Marais followed next. This venture marked the beginning of a wonderful friendship with Michel Bernstein and an extensive series of recordings – around sixty in total. They made these compositions accessible and were also a testimony to an expressive style of performance.

At the same time, Savall realised that his time as a “musical mercenary” selling his talent here, there and everywhere was coming to an end. He needed to establish his own ensemble. He brought together colleagues from the Schola, such as the lutenist Hopkinson Smith, and others, including his partner Montserrat Figueras, with whom he enjoyed a long and fruitful musical relationship until a few months before her death on 23 November 2011. Together they were to play and – something completely new! – improvise. With medieval and Renaissance music in particular, texts and notation provide clear information, but also leave plenty of scope for interpretation. In accordance with these principles, Savall and his musicians gave their first public concert in 1975. The ensemble as yet had no name, but their friend, the poet Antoni Pous, suggested “Hespèrion XX.”¹ Producer Gerd Berg of Electrola, the German subsidiary of EMI, immediately offered them the opportunity to record the series Reflexes. For Savall, the record at the time seemed to be the most reliable way of coming as close as possible to a vision, an ideal – of capturing an interpretation. Incidentally, he accidentally discovered the “secret” to making a recording sound as vibrant as a concert. During one of his first recordings in the church of Saint-Lambert-des-Bois, near an airport, he was forced to record at night because of the aircraft noise. In doing so, he found that exhaustion can lead to greater expressiveness, resulting in unexpected and often extraordinary things happening. He later applied this method to larger works, such as Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin in 1986 and Cererols’s Masses the following year, always in venues with natural, warm and space-filling acoustics, such as the collegiate church of Cardona in Catalonia. As recording technology developed further, he came to take more and more pleasure in live recordings, even for demanding works such as Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or Victoria’s Officia.

Step by step, with perseverance, Savall forged his convictions, his ethics and his aesthetics. He perused Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s texts on historical performance practice. They became his standard for measuring the success of the early music movement against that of contemporary music. Incidentally, he preferred the idea of a “living music” that encompasses all music played by musicians of our time and perceived as contemporary by listeners. Savall recognised his own views in the aesthetics of a major composer: Arvo Pärt, whose works connect both with the past and with their audience. Pärt and Savall’s collaboration was to prove fruitful; the composer wrote Da Pacem for the Catalan, a work dedicated to the victims of the 2004 Madrid bombings. Savall also reflected on Pablo Casals’s Conversations. One passage to stick in his mind particularly was “music dispels hatred in those who are without love. It gives peace to those who are restless, and comforts those who mourn.” He also pondered quotes from Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Gespräche über Musik (Conversations On Music), such as: “Music is the most spiritual of all the arts.” Or: “It only comes alive when a performer plays it, a singer sings it.” Or further: “The significance of a musical work does not depend on the significance of its form, but on the expressive content it conveys within itself and to the audience.”

He took inspiration from many other works, too, including Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. From this, Savall concluded that musical phrasing can only be authentic if it is not prefabricated, but arises organically. The song must already exist inside before the musician can bring it forth. Ultimately, it is always intuition that is decisive. This approach can be applied not only to unknown music that has no tradition of interpretation, such as music for the viola da gamba, but also to the most frequently performed works in the repertoire, such as the symphonies of Beethoven. Jordi tackles this colossus with unusual freshness and fervour, displaying respect for the sources, especially in terms of tempi, instruments and instrumentation from Beethoven’s time, so that one feels as if one were hearing the symphonies for the first time. Did the author of Ode to Joy not say, “Music is the perceptible transmission of spiritual life”?

In 1991, Jordi Savall worked on the film Tous les matins du monde together with the director Alain Corneau. It was a major artistic and a notable public success, and not only in France, rewarding many years of work behind the scenes and in the service of unknown repertoires. Based on the novel by Pascal Quignard, the film tells the story of the relationship between Marin Marais and his teacher Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, introducing Baroque music, the viola da gamba and the name of Jordi Savall to a wide audience. In 1994, his name also appeared in the credits of Jacques Rivette’s film Jeanne la Pucelle, for which he wrote the music.

Jordi Savall trod this path – from the Middle Ages to Romanticism, from chamber music to large ensembles, from gamba player to conductor, from small concerts to the world’s most prestigious concert halls – step by step, patiently and without forcing. In 1987, he thus founded the Capella Reial de Catalunya with Montserrat Figueras and musicians from Hespèrion XX, and two years later he founded an orchestra, Le Concert des Nations, to continue his exploration of music history from Purcell to Bruckner, via Vivaldi, Mozart, Haydn and many others, across all genres, from ballet, oratorios and symphonies to opera. In 2019, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Le Concert des Nations, Savall founded the Yocpa project (Youth Orchestra and Choir Professional Academies): professional academies for young singers and instrumentalists specialising in historical performance practice and the quest for what he calls the “original sound.” To mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, he worked on Beethoven’s nine symphonies; to this end, he organised various academies to prepare, study and record the works, bringing together an ensemble of both experienced and emerging professional musicians. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic and thanks to the support of a range of institutions (Ministère de la Culture in France, Generalitat de Catalunya, Diputació de Barcelona, etc.), Savall managed to bring this “Beethoven revolution” to fruition in 2020 on two albums, which were received with unanimous enthusiasm. Since then, he has continued to explore this repertoire with the Missa Solemnis, Haydn (The Creation and The Seasons), Schubert (the last two symphonies), Mozart (Requiem and Great Mass in C minor), Mendelssohn (Symphony No. 4, Midsummer Night’s Dream), and an album Forgotten Symphonies dedicated to Schumann and Bruckner. Each time, he succeeded in establishing a fruitful dialogue between these works and today’s audience: by constantly returning to the sources, Savall brings these masterpieces of the past to life. His mind, ever alert and critical, re-thinks every score in order to get to know it better and ultimately appreciate it even more.

All this makes Jordi Savall a consummate musician. As already stated above, he is a prominent figure in the global cultural scene. For many, he has changed their approach not just to music, but to art in general – and perhaps even to life itself. In an all too often artificial world, Savall has for generations represented a rare example of dignity and ethics. In turbulent and uncertain times, in which hierarchies and certainties have been relativised, intolerance is growing stronger, and everything appears superficial and homogenised, Savall, drawing on the sources of our culture and humanism, enquires into a troubled universalism, an unfinished identity, and a complex and sceptical way of thinking. After all his years of hard work in the service of past masters, he is now himself a beacon, one of those personalities who help us to endure what befalls us and perhaps rekindle our joy.

A trailblazer in this regard, too, Savall established his own foundation, Fundació Centre Internacional de Música Antiga, in Barcelona in 1997 – its structure and team enabling him to maintain his high pace of work – and a year later founded his own label, Alia Vox, which documents his artistic development and places particular emphasis on editorial and sound quality. Many book and CD publications, such as the Orient–Occident series, illustrate the increasingly cross-cultural dimensions his work has explored since the 2000s. These publications, nourished by memory and history, make an important contribution to reflecting on the present, without artificial divisions or deceptive simplifications – an act of resistance to the superficial immediacy of our time.

In 2008, he was appointed Ambassador for Intercultural Dialogue by the European Union and became part of UNESCO’s “Artists for Peace” programme. In this way, Jordi Savall lets music speak in the service of participation, tolerance and peace – to allow us to better understand the meaning of our origins and our tragedies, to render our rich diversity tangible through the interplay of voices and instruments. Music is, in his own words, an inexhaustible source of beauty and new discoveries. “Listening to Jordi Savall,” Amin Maalouf writes in Mare Nostrum, “is an experience like no other. For the aesthetic feeling is accompanied by an even more intense one: the enchanted sensation of being part of a reconciled humanity.”

In this spirit, Savall founded the “Music and History Festival for Intercultural Dialogue” at Fontfroide Abbey in southern France in 2015 and stepped up his support for refugees with the Orpheus XXI project. After the pandemic, he founded the Jordi Savall Festival at the Royal Monasteries of Santes Creus and Poblet in southern Catalonia.

Now aged 84, Jordi Savall continues to surprise us with new initiatives. His ideas inspire us, his interpretations move us. His energy and inspiration seem inexhaustible. He continues to believe that “without utopia, no truly fruitful activity is possible” (Mikhail Saltykov). But the fact that Jordi Savall is still capable of such creativity is probably also due to his good fortune of having found the love of his life a second time. The presence and support of his wife Maria Bartels, the Dutch philosopher whom he married in 2017, have given him fresh impetus. She is not only the companion of his private life, but also serves as an artistic, literary and personal advisor on his many projects. In September 2025, they jointly published a text on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entitled “Peut-on rester neutre face à un génocide?” (“Can one remain neutral in the face of a genocide?”), a powerful appeal for peace that met with a wide response.

Over the course of his career, Jordi Savall has received numerous honours and awards, including honorary doctorates from the universities of Évora (Portugal), Barcelona (Catalonia), Leuven (Belgium), Basel (Switzerland) and Utrecht (Netherlands).
He also received the Medalla d’Or from the Generalitat de Catalunya, and in 2014 was awarded the Premio Nacional de Música, which he rejected in protest against Spain’s lack of commitment to its early music heritage. He has received numerous international awards, including the Knight’s Cross of the French Legion of Honour, the Praetorius Music Prize of Lower Saxony and the Léonie Sonning Music Prize. He is also an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

Now the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize crowns this series of awards.

Translation: Margaret Hiley

¹“Hespèrion” derives from the ancient name for the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula. “XX” stood for the current century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ensemble changed its name to “Hespèrion XXI”.