The newly-founded Republic of China chose a leap year, 1912, to adopt the Gregorian calendar. In that same year, the British passenger liner Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, a solar eclipse was seen across Europe, a parachutist jumped from a moving plane for the first time, Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States, Amundsen announced his arrival at the South Pole, the Summer Olympics were held in Stockholm, and the first Keystone Comedy was released. The music world benefited from the births of Erich Leinsdorf, Georg Solti, Kathleen Ferrier, Alfred Deller, Perry Como, and Woody Guthrie, and the Deutsche Oper opened its magnificent new house in Berlin amidst rumors of war; the first performances of Ariadne auf Naxos and “Alexander's Ragtime Band” had their distinct effects, while Diaghilev's Ballets Russes were taking Europe by storm and a dancer in a rather different mode, Gene Kelly, was being born in Pittsburgh; the world lost a valued composer, Jules Massenet, and gained three others: John Cage, Jean Françaix, and Xavier Montsalvatge.

Anyone looking on would have said that being born into an upper middle-class family of bankers, writers, painters, and sculptors — “with one of the finest pedigrees in the country” — in the beautiful riverside capital of the Province of Girona in 1912 put a boy in an admirable position. Such a child occupied an enviable place in a milieu that was known for its economic ascendancy within Spanish society, and its circles exalted the role of the arts in a way that is remarkable in any place or time. The infant was “given to light,” as they say there, after a major flowering of the visual arts in Catalonia under an exuberant style called modernisme, which was a distinctive take on impulses that produced art nouveau or Jugendstil elsewhere. The movement crucially affected the attitudes with which Catalans like the Montsalvatges faced the world.