The use of a narrative, discursive or argumentative strategy based upon making animals speak is almost as ancient as culture itself. From Aesop to Disney, passing through La Fontaine and Orwell, the device of granting human language to animals has been employed in various ways and for various purposes, yet almost always with an educational aim - education meant in its broadest sense. In one way or another, we are all children of Disney. How many childhood tears, crucial to our emotional...

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...

Thomas Mann, in one of the most famous cases of audio-visual synaesthesia, stated in a letter to visual artist Emil Pretorius that Lohengrin’s sound is ‘silvery blue’. It may be so. Josep Pons, the great triumph of the premiere night achieved Lohengrin’s beautiful silvery blue sound. Pons, the principal conductor at Liceu’s Orchestra since 2012, achieved with this Lohengrin one of the best performances of the orchestra in the last few seasons. The ensemble...

As the year commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich's death approaches, smart theatres are preparing new productions of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, the composer's second, last and most famous opera, with the idea of renting it out to other theatres and thus recouping their investment. Beyond its many musical and dramatic merits, this opera, one of the finest of the 20th century, is - unfortunately - known for the fact that Stalin disliked it and...

The Liceu has opened the year with a revival that is also a birthday party. In 1999, the Peralada Festival commissioned Calixto Bieito to stage direct a new production of Carmen. In 2010 and 2015 this Carmen, which has travelled to more than 70 theatres around the world, could be seen at Liceu. Now, on the 25th anniversary of the premiere, it has returned once again to the Barcelona stage. Carmen was the title that placed Bieito's name in the international panorama of opera...

Gran Teatre del Liceu has inaugurated the new season by putting Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin on stage in a new co-production between the Barcelona theatre, Den Norske Opera in Oslo, which premiered the production in 2020, and Teatro Real of Madrid that will present it next season. This new approach to this surprising intimate wonder – Tchaikovsky called it "lyrical scenes" rather than opera – based on the novel of the same name in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin,...