Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, with the French libretto having been written by Jules Barbier. It premiered at the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris on 10 February 1881, but Offenbach never got to see it having died four months earlier. It had, however, been presented in an abridged form at the composer’s house, 8 Boulevard des Capucines, on 18 May 1879, and a version that...

35 years after having last appeared at Liceu, Puccini's Trittico has returned to its stage. It has done so in a 2017 Munich Opera production directed by Lotte de Beer. Achieving a visual and dramatic union in a single production of three titles as different as those that make up Il Trittico is not at all easy, the Dutch stage director half succeeds at it. De Beer takes death as a thread: in the first opera, a passionate thriller, there is a murder; in the second, a melodrama, we...

These aren’t good times for new productions, theatres’ pockets are empty and everyone makes do as they can. For the performances of Les contes d’Hoffmann, Liceu had to rescue from the storage the production directed by Laurent Pelly, accredited Offenbach specialist. This same production was shown in Barcelona in 2013 and in a way it was already a re-elaboration of the work Pelly himself had done ten years prior for the Lausanne opera house with the same team...

Like the Shakespeare play upon which it is based, Giuseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera Otello of 1887 is the story of a general in the Venetian military whose skills in managing political and personal affairs do not match those he has demonstrated in fighting. When his ensign Iago feels Otello has sidelined him for promotion, he lays a trap to make Otello believe his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful, and the general falls whole-heartedly for the deception with disastrous...

Turandot was the opera that would have been going on stage when the theatre was destroyed in a fire in January 1994. Embodying a spirit of continuity, Turandot was chosen to inaugurate the new theatre rebuilt in 1999. Now, on the 20th anniversary of Liceu’s re-inauguration, Puccini’s last opera was again the title selected to open the new season. Turandot, an opera which historically did not have any particularly significant relationship with the theatre has become, due to the...

Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata of 1853 is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world today. Based on Alexandre Dumas, fils’s play La Dame aux camélias, it tells of Violetta Valéry who is a famed Parisian courtesan. Beneath her apparently carefree exterior, however, she is suffering from tuberculosis and her world is shaken when she meets Alfredo with whom she falls in love. They run away together and live off the sale of her goods, but one day...