‘Summer 1936. The Berlin Olympics are announced for the first day of August. The People's Olympics in Barcelona for 19 July. Legend has it that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, decides that the official music of the Third Reich's Olympics will be Ludwig Van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and his Ode to Joy. But Pau Casals, who is the cultural commissioner of the People's Olympics in Barcelona, representing the democratic world, is furious and decides that there is no way Beethoven will be kidnapped by the Nazis. From that moment on, the Ode to Joy was to be sung at the opening of the People's Olympics in the Montjuic stadium. A few days before the inauguration, General Mola, ‘the director’ of the impending coup d'état, sent a coded telegram to the soldiers who were to rise up against the Second Republic. The coded content reads: ‘Last 15th, at four o'clock in the morning, Elena gave birth to a beautiful baby boy’. The message indicated that the military rebellion would begin on 18 July at five o'clock in the morning. It was the beginning of one of the most terrible episodes in the history of our country’. Andrés Lima