Joan Manuel Serrat, Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2024 | Culture

Joan Manuel Serrat (Barcelona, ​​80 years old) is the winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts 2024. There cannot be a Spanish musician who deserves this award, one of the most important in culture at a European level, as much as the author. of Mediterranean. There are few Spanish popular music singers who have won this award in the 45 editions, since it began its journey in 1981. Paco de Lucía won it in 2004 and Carmen Linares more recently, in 2022, an award that the singer shared with the dancer María Pagés. Bob Dylan achieved it in 2007.

Serrat retired from the stage in December 2022 in a packed Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona. Previously he also performed in Madrid, always with full venues. Those recitals were a worthy end for a unique artist. He barely resorted to sentimentality (“tonight we leave aside the melancholy and nostalgia because we only have the future left”), something that the public that came to say goodbye to him was looking forward to. He wanted to give the sensation of one more recital in a career that spans six decades. He could have extended himself with tearful and self-aggrandizing speeches, but that was never his style. In return, he dedicated an interval between successes to warning about the danger of global warming and made an urgent call to “save the planet.” He, who, as he said, will no longer see him. At another point in the recital he said: “I proclaim my dismissal of my own free will.” Along with the cheers, cries of emotion were heard.

That commonplace that is used for some artists when they claim that their music “has marked several generations” is absolutely real with Serrat. In 2006, the Spanish edition of the magazine Rolling Stone conducted a survey among 100 industry professionals to choose the 200 best Spanish pop-rock songs. The first was Mediterranean. Young Fizz Bands indie Spanish like Sidonie or La Cámara Roja placed Serrat’s anthem in first place.

A post-war boy from the popular neighborhood of Calle Poeta Cabanyes in Poble-sec, between Montjuïc and Paral·lel, Serrat has been putting together a discography since 1967 based on stylistic eclecticism and a humanist care for texts. He has sung poets such as Antonio Machado, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Alberti or León Felipe, and has also become a poet of the time in which he has lived. In a country often confronted, he has always known how to position himself where sensible people would do so. If you have questions about any topic, ask Serrat.

Making a list of some of your songs means going to the music player (vinyl is best, but Spotify also works) to listen to them: Your name tastes like grass to me, Penelope, For freedom, Those little things, Words of love, Cantares, Mediterranean…That firm, deliberately trembling and above all familiar voice. Serrat has composed the song with which we fall in love, get divorced, use it to iron, make love, console our children or say goodbye to our parents. All the situations in our lives have a background song by Serrat.

Since he said goodbye, Serrat has not stopped receiving awards: National Culture Award from the Generalitat of Catalonia, Honoris Causa from the University of Barcelona, ​​adopted son of Orihuela (the land of Miguel Hernández)… And now the Princesa arrives of Asturias of the Arts. What he is doing now Nano (as his friends Miguel Ríos, Ana Belén or Joaquín Sabina call him) is what he announced a few months ago: “I am leaving the stage, but I am not leaving what life offers me.”