This Europe: Gaudi's life receives the designer treatment

The Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi, whose life and work is celebrated this year, was an inhibited loner whose repressed personality contrasted with the voluptuous sensuality of his buildings.

Or so we thought. A big hand, please, for Gaudi: The Musical, a €2.5m (£1.6m) production opening in Barcelona this autumn.

Transforming Gaudi's uneventful life into a musical was something of a challenge, the project's scriptwriter, Jordi Galceran, concedes. He junked his first script because it was too dreary.

Then the producers tweaked the truth to create a vibrant spectacle based on Gaudi's love for three women. This may surprise those who believe his indifference to women and sex indicated a suppressed homosexuality.

The composer, Albert Guinovart, said: "All the important people in Gaudi's life were men: men at university, men who commissioned his buildings and men who built them. We had to introduce women to have some female voices, essential in a musical."

The action centres on the only dramatic event in Gaudi's life: the moment in 1926 when he was hit by a tram and mistaken for a vagrant because of his ragged clothes.

Delirious in the three days before he died, Gaudi – in the musical at least – reviews his life, focusing on the three women he most loved: his mother, the love of his life; the pianist Pepeta Moreu, a liberated divorcee who abandoned him for another man; and his orphan niece Rosita, a mystical and alcoholic pioneer of underground culture.

"We haven't lied or made anything up," Guinovart said. "We've just exaggerated a little."