La Bohème, the title that never fails, the joy of the box office, has come back to Liceu. For over a hundred years La Bohème has continued to work perfectly around the world. Firstly, this is due to the underlying moral and ethical codes continuing to be largely valid, with little variations. And because the late Romantic and bourgeois concept of love (and sex) and of couple relationships on which it is based continue to be largely shared in the Western...

Tradition states that Puccini is the operatic composer who better expressed the complexities of the feminine soul. Feminism might have something to say about this and might not agree much. What is true, however, is that the Puccinian female characters have a musical depth and theatrical density far greater than the masculine ones, who often tend to be more schematic and stereotypical. The dramatic weight difference between the feminine and the masculine characters, which starts...

Liceu has opened the season with Macbeth, a title that hadn’t been featured in the theatre for more than 10 years. Musically, this Verdi opera still shows some traces of some late Bel Canto remains but also starts to announce the maturity and the personal style of the great central trilogy (Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore). Dramatically, it preserves and it even concentrates and thickens all of the primal violent, bloody, atavistic and barbaric theatrical strength of...