Falstaff at the Gran Teatre del Liceu: three Farewells

Few works are at once as light-hearted and as profound as Falstaff. Giuseppe Verdi chose to end his operatic career with a comedy when everyone was expecting another tragedy. Yet beneath the laughter lies a lucid reflection on old age, the passing of time, appearances and the human condition. The laughter in Falstaff is never superficial. Shakespeare, who created the character, had already mastered the art of blending the sublime with the grotesque, humour with melancholy, and Arrigo...

I puritani, with a libretto by Count Carlo Pepoli, was Vincenzo Bellini’s final opera, as he died just eight months after its premiere in January 1835. Based on Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers, an historical play by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine, it is set during the English Civil War, although the specific episode described is fictitious. In fact, the narrative was always intended to be a commentary on the political climate of 1830s Paris following the...

Even before the curtain rises, the overture to Le Nozze di Figaro begins, and at once the audience starts to experience a surge of happiness. There are very few pieces of music that so clearly and reliably promise to usher the spirit into a state of happiness; perhaps only the opening Allegro of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony could be compared with it. Mendelssohn, like Mozart, was one of those composers who came into the world to make it a little more habitable and...

Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila, which premiered in Weimar in 1877, is the only one of the composer’s operas to be regularly performed today. In describing how the Israelite Samson is duped by the Philistine Dalila into divulging the secret to his strength, thus enabling him to be weakened and blinded, the story comes from Chapter 16 of the Book of Judges. However, it concentrates on certain elements and downplays others, ignoring the heroic deeds that earned...

Premiering in 1945, with a libretto adapted by Montagu Slater from a section of George Crabbe’s 1810 narrative poem The Borough, Peter Grimes focuses on the type of outsider figure that always fascinated Benjamin Britten. Originally set in a nineteenth century Suffolk coastal village, it focuses on the clash between Grimes, a hard working fisherman who dreams of wealth and respect, and a narrow-minded and repressive community who will never judge him kindly, irrespective of what...

Xabier Anduaga, who in the coming years will almost certainly emerge as a major interpreter of Werther, is not quite there yet. The young tenor from San Sebastián’s debut in the title role was the principal draw of the current run of Werther at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, where the work had not been staged for nearly a decade. The result was an undeniable success, though there remains ground to cover. Anduaga possesses what matters most for a role that ranks among the most...