Tosca, one of the titles in the repertoire that performs best at the box office, has returned to Liceu to reach the figure of two hundred performances in the history ofthe Barcelona theatre. It has done so in a co-production between Liceu and other Spanish and European theatres under the direction of the young Sevillian director Rafael R. Villalobos, aspiring enfant terrible of today's operatic stage direction. Villalobos's Tosca is one of those that needs an instruction manual...

Set in Nagasaki, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly of 1904-07, with a libretto by Giuseppe Giacoso and Luigi Illica, explores the relationship between the American naval officer Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San from the city’s Omara district. Cio-Cio-San, who Pinkerton knows as Madam Butterfly, takes their love so seriously that she converts to Christianity, and is consequently ostracised by her family. He, on the other hand, sees their marriage as being akin to his Japanese house,...

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 ‘friend’ 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...

Surprisingly, a major title of the French operatic tradition such as Gounod’s Faust had never been staged before at the Salzburg Festival. It happened this year in a production signed by Austrian director Reinhard von der Thannen, responsible for sets and costumes as well. However solid the cast was, the main focus of the production was certainly von der Thannen’s staging  – and with good reason (one could actually tell right from the programme notes, entrusted to...

Rien - "Nothing" thrones over the bright white stage. "We start from nothing and return to nothing" might be one theme of this contradictory direction of Reinhard von der Thannen. He is responsible for the direction, the costumes and the stage design of this first presentation of this opera in Salzburg. He has studied and worked with Hans Neuenfels, originally as stage and costume designer, and you can feel the influence and some memories of the controversial...

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...