La Balanguera turns 100: original scores in Palma

A century after its musical premiere, La Balanguera was sung in Palma on Friday as Mallorca marked 100 years of its anthem. Singer Marga Pocoví opened the Diada de Mallorca event with Joan Alcover’s poem Cançó dels pins, before performing La Balanguera. The Consell de Mallorca staged the commemoration around the origins of the work and the people who shaped it.

Consell president Llorenç Galmés said the anthem holds a place in Mallorca’s shared emotional memory and has brought generations together. He said the anniversary was a chance to look again at the documents, music and people behind the symbol, while passing on that cultural and linguistic heritage to younger people.

Manuscripts map the anthem’s path

An exhibition in the Consell’s council chamber follows La Balanguera through original manuscripts, musical scores and other papers. Musicologist Eugènia Gallego set out the work’s history and the musical traditions linked to it.

Among the pieces is Antoni Noguera’s handwritten choral score, held in the documentary collection of the University of the Balearic Islands. The display also includes a manuscript of La Balanguera for the cossiers of Manacor and Noguera’s piano score, published in a 1893 album of Mallorcan composers.

Visitors can also see La Valanjera, a keyboard piece dated between 1833 and 1850 and kept at the Historical Archive of the Congregation of the Oratory of Sant Felip Nerí in Palma. Amadeu Vives’s original edition for voice and piano is included alongside a letter to Lluís Canals and an original photograph of Alcover.

From Alcover’s poem to Mallorca’s anthem

The Consell has also renewed its permanent exhibition, Joan Alcover, el poeta cavaller, at Ca n’Alcover in 2026. It includes material on the musical composition of La Balanguera and its later rise as Mallorca’s anthem.

In February, the Consell marked the poem’s first public reading at Palma’s Gran Hotel, where Alcover read it himself on 15 February 1903. The centenary now links that first reading with the musical version that followed and became a defining song for Mallorca.

Topics: Culture · Manacor · Palma

Source: Europa Press / Mallorca.com