In the early 1898 Joan Manén and his father reached Berlin and became friends with Otto Goldschmidt and his wife, the pianist Berta Marx-Goldschmidt. Otto Goldsmith was the personal secretary of the great violinist Pablo Sarasate, very well related in Berlin’s musical circles, and, convinced of Manén’s talent from early on, he decided to support his career. Goldschmidt prepared an audition for Manén with the mentioned violinist and the young performer used the opportunity to perform the “Zigeunerweisen”, composed by Sarasate himself. However, even though Manén was lucky to make Sarasate’s acquaintance and possibly received musical advice during their meetings, the relationship between the two violinists always remained distant and frosty, possibly due to professional rivalry.
Thanks to the relationship with Goldschmidt, Manén had access to a musical circle of high intellectual and artistic level that enriched him and allowed him to grow as a musician: he attended great concerts where he could listen to some of the best musicians of the moment; he auditioned for Herman Wolff, Berlin's leading artist representative; he personally met great composers and interpreters such as Max Bruch, Eugene D'Albert, Rosa Sucher, Leopold Auer, Teresa Carreño or Antonin Dvorak; and was even introduced to the publisher Fritz Simrock, who noticed the compositional talent of the young musician and decided to edit numerous works by him for violin and piano. In 1898, thanks to the audition carried out with Herman Wolff, Manén performed as a soloist at the “Singakademie” together with the “Berlin Philharmoniker” under Josef Rebicek, performing his own Concerto Espagnol and two of his Caprichos. Before the end of the year, he made his debut in Paris, at the “Nouveau Théâtre” during the Beethoven Festival and then was able to perform with the Warsaw Philharmonic, conducted by Emil Mlynarski. In January 1899 he was hired to give fifteen recitals in Germany and the following month he replaced Fritz Kreisler in Berlin. On the 21th of March, during a private gathering, Manén had the great honour of playing Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy accompanied by the composer himself on the piano, and during the summer he finished Caprichos Catalanes No. 3 and 4 as well as various works for violin and piano.
Manén inaugurated the new century with a recital at the “Rokoko Saal” in Hotel Disch, Cologne, accompanied on the piano by the great German composer Richard Strauss. During a visit to Barcelona, ??Manén conducted his Catalònia Symphony (later rewritten and renamed Nova Catalònia) for the first time (“Teatre Líric”, 20th of May, 1900); an ambitious work in four movements written during the previous summer and created almost exclusively with popular Catalan themes.
However, from this moment on, the concerts in Germany grew scarcer and the family began to suffer economically so Manén decided to try his luck composing a zarzuela and titled his first attempt Lo supplici de Tántalo. In October of 1900 the zarzuela was performed on several occasions at the “Teatro Principal” and a movement of the work in the form of a sardana (Coreijada) was so successful that the composer decided to transform it into an independent sardana piece: Patria para cobla. A year later a second zarzuela written by Manén was staged, El elixir d'amore, also with a libretto adapted by Antoni Ferrer Codina.
Early in 1902, Manén began writing the opera Jeanne de Naples with a libretto by his friend, the poet Maurice Chassang. Thanks to the contacts by the editor Vidal y Llimona, the opera was premiered in Italian (Giovanna di Napoli) on the 22nd of January, 1903 at “Gran Teatre del Liceu”, Barcelona, conducted by Edoardo Mascheroni. The work proved so successful that the same theatre commissioned a new opera from Manén for the following season. To carry out the commission, they only put one condition: that the libretto had to be set in Roman times, so they could reuse an expensive stage set by Francesc Soler Rovirosa that had been used for an opera by Anton Rubinstein. Manén began working intensely and with great enthusiasm on Acté, an opera based on a libretto in Catalan written by himself.
In March, 1903, Manén presented his Piano Quartet Mobilis in Mobili as a contribution to the composition competition organised by the Concert Society of Madrid. The work did not win the competition, but was premiered by the Madrid Quartet with great success at the same concert where Manén performed Paganini's Concerto No. 2 as a soloist with a new orchestration he had written. The concert took place at “Teatro Real” in Madrid and the great pianist Teresa Carreño, who was a good friend of Manén and later collaborated in orchestral projects with him, was in the audience.
On the 3rd of December, 1903, Manén’s opera Acté was premiered at “Gran Teatre de Liceu”. Amadeo Vives and Joan Lamote de Grignon wrote articles supporting the composer and his work in the “Revista Musical Catalana”, after it had received almost unanimously negative criticism from Barcelonian society. The Barcelonian audience at the time had an Italianized taste and was not prepared for the novelty and originality of the musical language of Manén, which united a harmonic development and thematic elaboration of Germanic influence with a Mediterranean temperament and inspiration.