The Palau de la Música Catalana was created as a home for the Orfeó Català, a choral society founded in 1891 during the cultural revival known as the Renaixença. Choral singing, Catalan language, and historical memory helped a growing urban middle class express a collective identity within Spain. The society acquired a confined site in Barcelona's old city in 1904 and commissioned architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner to design a headquarters and concert hall. Construction began in 1905 and was financed largely through subscriptions and support from local industrial and professional families.

Opened in 1908, the building used a steel frame to create a light-filled auditorium on an exceptionally tight parcel. Brick, ceramic mosaic, stained glass, ironwork, and sculpture united architecture with decorative arts. Images of folk song, classical music, Saint George, and the Catalan flag made the hall a civic statement as well as a performance space. Its great inverted stained-glass skylight brought daylight into the auditorium, while the stage composition joined Wagnerian valkyries with a bust of the Catalan composer and poet Josep Anselm Clavé.

The Palau quickly became Barcelona's leading concert venue, hosting the Orfeó, international orchestras, conductors, and soloists as well as political and cultural assemblies. That identification with Catalan public life also made it vulnerable. In 1925, during Miguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, spectators at a tribute involving the Orfeó Català jeered the Spanish royal march and applauded “God Save the King.” Authorities closed the Palau temporarily and restricted the choir, turning the building into a symbol of cultural repression.

During the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Catalan institutions and public use of the language faced severe limits. The Palau survived and continued presenting music, even as its national symbolism was constrained and adapted. Performances gradually helped reconnect Barcelona with European musical life. After Spain's democratic transition, the hall again openly represented Catalan culture. A consortium and foundation supported major restoration and expansion campaigns, including work by architect Òscar Tusquets that improved services while preserving Domènech's auditorium.

UNESCO inscribed the Palau with Domènech's Hospital de Sant Pau in 1997 as masterpieces of Catalan Modernisme. The institution later faced a different crisis when financial misconduct by former leaders was exposed in 2009, prompting legal proceedings and governance reforms. The scandal showed that preservation required institutional accountability as well as architectural conservation. The Palau's history joins artistic innovation to civic struggle: it has served as choir headquarters, concert hall, nationalist emblem, target of dictatorship, democratic cultural institution, and protected monument. Music has never been separate from the political meanings invested in its walls. The hall's acoustics and dense ornament helped make attendance itself a civic ritual. Audiences did not merely hear music; they gathered beneath imagery presenting Catalonia as modern, cultured, industrious, and rooted in tradition. That message explains both the building's popularity and the suspicion it aroused under centralizing dictatorships. Continued performance preserves this historical function more fully than conversion into a conventional museum would have done. Its continuing concert calendar keeps that original union of building, audience, choral tradition, and civic expression alive.