Rusalka at the Gran Teatre del Liceu: Beware of Tales

Fairy tales and witches are often – sugar-coated in disguise – terrible narratives full of anguish, loneliness, and fear. Beneath the barely concealed veneer of culture, they pulse with our “dark sides”, our most disorderly desires, alien to any moral framework. This is why it is so educational and necessary to tell these stories to our children from an early age, so they can name and shape their fears to grow up healthy. We must give a name and face to our fears...

Charles-François Gounod’s Faust, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris on 19 March 1859. It underwent several revisions over the following decade, including the insertion of a ballet into Act V to meet the expectations of grand opera, and was extremely popular in the nineteenth century. It was the work with which New York’s Metropolitan Opera opened for the first time on...

In the program booklet, Calixto Bieito stated regarding his work as stage director of Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Liceu that “the best lie is the truth,” referring to the fact that he does not judge but merely presents the grotesque absurdities of the real world with clarity, and does so through opera—if anyone is to learn something from it, let them do so. Applied to Giulio Cesare, this means presenting the characters as an extravagant tribe of super-millionaires...

The success that Nadine Sierra achieved last January with La Traviata was already enormous, but what she has achieved now with La Sonnambula is even greater and consecrates her as the new undisputed queen of the Liceu. Sierra has it all: her voice is beautiful, warm and lyrical in the centre, brilliant and sharp at the top, her breath control is exceptional, and her projection is optimal. She has an easy stratospheric treble, regulates the dynamics exquisitely in any area of the...

Although Georg Philipp Telemann is acclaimed as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and one of the most prolific ever in terms of volume of output, his operas have been somewhat neglected. This performance of Pimpinone, or, to give it its full title, Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid), represents the first time that Covent Garden...

It is exactly one hundred years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. It received generally positive reviews, but some critics felt it compared unfavourably with his previous novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and it was not a great commercial success. In fact, when Fitzgerald died in 1940 he believed himself to be a failure and that his work would soon be forgotten. However, during World War II the Council on...