Joan Manén was a musician that gave off the impression of being highly self-centred. His projects were usually originated by him, for him, and the whole world had to revolve around his unusual artistic, an even genius, talent. He achieved a level of success and prestige in Europe enjoyed by very few Spanish musicians of his generation. However, during the last ten years of his life, Manén started to become isolated. His magnetism on the stage became just a memory and his compositional work - of post-romantic and nationalist aesthetics – did not dovetail entirely into a musical panorama in which new avant-garde musical trends prevailed. Manén was an innovative composer with his own voice, which was the result of a very personal harmonic language, but his music evolved along conservative aesthetic lines that were rooted in expression and melody and championed an original use of modulation. Several of his latest works were never premiered: the Rapsodia Catalana for piano and orchestra, the Symphony No. 2 Ibérica or the choral work El petit maridet that the Orfeó Català failed to perform due to its extreme difficulty.
In 1954 the first stone of a new Auditorium in Barcelona was laid down. Joan Manén's wish was to provide the city of Barcelona with a third large auditorium, along with the operatic hall “Gran Teatre del Liceu” and “Palau de la Música Catalana”. He wanted to create a large concert hall, bearing his name, with the capacity of 2,000 spectators that had the technical and acoustic characteristics to compete with the most important halls in Europe. The works progressed slowly and in 1958, with the auditorium only half-built, the Manén family saw their funding jeopardized. The auditorium was being erected on Balmes Street, on the corner of Castaño Street, and was financed through income stemming from agricultural exploitations of large land areas on Cuba, inherited from the family of Manén’s wife, Valentina Kurz. After Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement, all their properties were nationalized and the source for financing the construction was taken away from them. Seeing the infeasibility of continuing the construction, the Manén-Kurz family donated the auditorium to the Barcelona City Council with only one condition: The City Council had to finish the Auditorium - which would bear the name of Manén - within a stipulated period. If the inauguration did not happen within the agreed term, the building would once again pass to the family. In October, 1959, seeing that the construction work had not progressed, Manén used his visits to the United States to present his project and find possible financing sources. In 1961 the Auditorium returned to the hands of the Manén-Kurz family in the same state in which it had been transferred to the City Council. In January, 1963, the family sold the Auditorium to a businessman named Pedro Balañá, who promised to finish it. However, Joan Manén’s dream of seeing his Auditorium inaugurated was never fulfilled, since Pedro Balañá died shortly afterwards and his heirs did not commit to finish the construction. The skeleton of the Auditorium remained unchanged for dozens of years and was then demolished by the Balañá family to build movie theatres in the year 2000.
Joan Manén devoted an important part of his life to composing his culminating work, Don Juan, a trilogy of operas that reviewed the myth of Don Juan. The libretto, written by himself, treated the myth in a new way; instead of having Don die at the hands of a man, he had him die at the hands of one of his lovers after being shipwrecked on the Catalan coast, returning from Italy. The trilogy of operas was one of the composer's last compositions. The music has a fundamentally Mediterranean essence, with rhythmic and melodic elements that often stem from Spanish popular music and are transformed in order to achieve universality. For Manén, Spanish music had to avoid regionalism in order to achieve a unity of universal symbolic inspiration, using the means of the great European compositional tradition. The same composer called this style "iberismo", which was characteristic of his mature period. The trilogy, completed in 1963, is divided into three operas entitled: Don Juan, El invitado de piedra and El eterno Don Juan. Manén’s last dream was to see the Don Juan trilogy premiered at the Juan Manén Auditorium.
Throughout life, writing texts was one of Manén’s great passions. He was the author of the librettos for six of his seven operas. He wrote seven books, three of which were personal memoirs, published under the title of Mis Experiencias - the last two volumes published in 1964 and 1970. He also wrote many articles on music in newspapers and specialized magazines; from 1948 to 1955 he had his own column in the newspaper “La Vanguardia” titled “Variaciones sin tema”, in which he collected facts and anecdotes from all over the world. The same newspaper continued to keep him as a columnist until 1965. The Editorial Ramón Sopena also published posthumously his work Diccionario de celebridades musicales, co-authored with the musicologist Artur Menéndez Aleixandre and completed by Manuel Valls after the violinist's passing. The dictionary is a peculiar and unusual work due to its eminently subjective tone, in which Manén often makes very personal value judgments of famous musicians that are uncharacteristic for this type of publication.
Joan Manén dedicated preciously little time to pedagogy. Nevertheless, he was the teacher of several violinists, including Juan Alós, Manuel Viscasillas, Leonor Alves da Sousa, Enric Madriguera, Elaine Tutte and Andor von Wesspremy, continuing the violin school of Delphin Alard: this school exposed an easy, flexible and elegant playing style that had been passed on to Manén from his teacher Clemente Ibarguren. Manén was Doctor Honoris Causa and Professor of several conservatoires in Germany, Sweden, Italy and the United States, but never gave classes regularly at any institution due to his busy performance schedule and compositional work. An important contribution to string pedagogy was Manén’s publication El violin (Editorial Labor, 1958), which provided an exhaustive review of violin technique from his point of view. The book exposes the opinions of a musician with great personality, innate talent and extensive experience.
During the first years of his career the violinist performed, among others, with a violin made by the Catalan luthier Étienne Madre Clarà. He later acquired the definitive instrument that he used for most of his performances: a Petrus Guarneri that had belonged to Felix Mendelssohn. He also owned a Giovanni Paolo Maggini and a second violin by Étienne Madre Clarà.
During the last years of his life, several of his followers in Spain asked public institutions for tribute events to be held for Manén in their cities. In 1966 two important events took place in Valencia and Madrid. On the 15th of December, the RTVE Symphonic Orchestra, conducted by Enrique García Asensio, performed a programme in the capital that was made up exclusively of his symphonic works, while also awarding him with the "Great Cross of Civil Merit". His hometown, Barcelona, however, ??did not pay him any tribute in his last years of life.
The long and extraordinary life of this important musician ended on the 26th of June, 1971. At his funeral there were few who came to see him off; some friends, musicians and his closest family. Thus, ended the life of an artist devoted body and soul to music, a violinist who achieved great international prestige, and a solid composer who produced more than 120 works. His important legacy remains as a hidden treasure, at the service of all those who wish to discover it.