An Elisir of Eternal Youth at the Liceu

It is unusual for an operatic production to remain in the repertory for more than forty years, and rarer still for it to continue looking fresh and youthful. This Elisir d’amore, which will occupy the Liceu throughout the Christmas season, has a long and distinguished history. In 1983 Barcelona’s Grec Festival presented a staging of L’Elisir by Mario Gas in open-air performances; in the early 1990s it was revived at the Festival de Peralada; towards the end of that decade...

Georg Friedrich Haendel’s Partenope, which premiered at the King's Theatre in London on 24 February 1730, follows the structure and forms of opera seria. It can hardly be described as such, however, since it is so humorous in tone, while the music is relatively light textured. Its libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from one originally written in 1699 by Silvio Stampiglia, and the story’s frivolous nature led the opera company the Royal Academy of Music to reject the...

Composed between 1923 and 1925, The Makropulos Case, with music and libretto by Leoš Janáček, is based on Karel Čapek’s eponymous play. Originally set in Prague in 1922, it concerns a hundred year old probate case entitled Gregor v. Prus. When Baron Joseph Ferdinand Prus died in 1827 his cousin claimed the estate, but so too did one Ferdinand Gregor, who asserted that the Baron had promised it to him. While the people originally involved are long dead, their...

Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, with a libretto by Terrence McNally, premiered in 2000 at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, and has appeared at The Metropolitan Opera. In spite of this, it has only ever enjoyed a smattering of outings in the United Kingdom, including a semi-staged performance at the Barbican in 2018, and productions by Welsh National Opera and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2019 and 2023 respectively. In fact, Annilese Miskimmon’s new...

Philip Glass’s Akhnaten has at last reached the Gran Teatre del Liceu, in what was also its Spanish premiere. Composed in 1983 by the Baltimore-born composer, the opera centres on the figure of the pharaoh - husband of the celebrated and photogenic Nefertiti - who sought to establish monotheism in fourteenth-century BCE Egypt, only to fail in the face of fierce opposition from the priestly caste whose privileges his reforms threatened. Structured in three acts charting the...

Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera Albert Herring, Op. 39, with a libretto by Eric Crozier, is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1887 novella Le Rosier de Madame Husson, albeit with the action transposed to an English setting. Set around 1900 in Loxford, which is a fictitious town but typical of those to be found in East Suffolk, it sees Lady Billows and the community’s elite attempt to organise the annual May Day festival. They need to elect a May Queen, but the housekeeper...