After 175 years of life and despite its long Wagnerian tradition, the Liceu began to produce for the first time, and together with La Monnaie in Brussels, the great operatic cycle that is The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen in German). . These sixteen hours of musical drama, as Wagner preferred to call it, which represent an Everest for any self-respecting stage director, will arrive in Barcelona with the signature of one of the most desired stage directors today: the Italian Romeo Castellucci, a prophetic architect-philosopher, visual artist, designer and playwright, who with his particular ethical and aesthetic ceremony has spent years revolutionizing the way of understanding the genre.
“Being able to present a Ring is a dream for any opera house in the world, but within the tradition of Wagner with the Liceu, we have to talk about an important event. And added to the fact that it is a Castellucci co-production, it is already a must that announces an exceptional ritual approximation”, says Víctor García de Gomar, artistic director of the Gran Teatre, for whom the Italian artist is an asset for the survival of the Opera. "He recodes it, and will reflect on today's world from the compendium of human emotions that is Tetralogy."
After the pandemic there is a revival of the Ring. Each theater wants to build its own, from Vienna to La Scala, Covent Garden or the Met. Paris has already announced his directed by Calixto Bieito. The work itself was already an aesthetic, philosophical and artistic revolution when in 1876 Wagner exposed the principles of his new doctrine, inspired by ancient tragedy. In his attempt to unite art and society, the so-called total work of art rose from its ashes, with Wagner basing himself on Norse mythology and deploying 34 characters with whom to narrate the perversion of the world when love is renounced to conquer power.
La Monnaie will offer the first two titles, The Gold of the Rhine and The Valkyrie, next season, under the baton of Alain Altinoglu, leaving for the other Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. For its part, the Liceu will begin programming in 2026-27, for when it is possible that Josep Pons is no longer in charge of the ship's music. And it will not serve them two by two –as it did in 2003 and 2004 with the Staatsoper Berlin production directed by Harry Kupfer–, but will resort to the logic of a theater that cannot afford to program more than a dozen operas per season. : give one per course, an option that followed from 2013 and 2016 with the environmentalist production of Robert Carsen from the Cologne Opera.
The Liceu claims, without a doubt, internationally with this challenge, worthy of the very same Bayreuth Festival that Wagner founded. The artistic director of the contest and great-granddaughter of the composer, Katharina Wagner, has not yet called Castellucci. Although her cousin Nike Wagner has already expressed her desire to see something of hers in the contest. He told this newspaper on the occasion of his visit to the Liceu in 2011. Between performances of Parsifal, he assured that he had just seen this same opera at La Monnaie, directed precisely by the Italian director, then in the process of taking off in the world of opera .
"I found it wonderful, far from the German tradition, sincere with the music," Nike Wagner said then, thirsty for another look at her great-grandfather's operas and for a Parsifal "that doesn't necessarily reflect German tradition and problems."
Knowing already then the operatic language, Castellucci hypnotized the spectators of the time with his halo of performance, for which the Belgian theater maintained a close collaboration that resulted in Gluck's Orphée et Eurydice (2014), Mozart's The Magic Flute ( 2018, first part in white, second in black), Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher de Honegger (2019) and Mozart's Requiem (2022). But, will his Parsifal have anything to do with his reading of Wagner in the Ring?
“It's a totally different approach,” De Gomar explains. While Parsifal is a spiritual journey, here Castellucci's would be a more carnal approach. On the one hand, he proposes an aesthetic ceremony with very unique elements, which is what distinguishes him from many other stage directors, but at the same time in the Ring we are before a compendium of human emotions. We are talking about carnality because the brothers Siegmund and Sieglinde consciously start an incestuous relationship; there is corruption, infidelity, abuse of power, neglect of the planet..., but at the same time there are very moral elements, like Fricka, the wife of the god Wotan; the complacency of Wotan himself; the filial love between him and Brünnhilde... all those human emotions that in Castellucci's gaze will serve as a warning and reflection on the behavior of humanity today”.
Castellucci will not be seen assuming Verdi's fast-paced plot montages, but titles that are closer to a ceremony. Those with which he manages to transcend and escape the mold, make a social criticism and throw a halo of hope to humanity. Thus, from Mahler he has staged Bach's St. Matthew Passion, or Moses und Aron, Schönberg's fourth opera, with which he debuted at the Paris opera in 2015 and which he took to the Real de Madrid the following year, fanning fires for the fact of placing a charolais bull of a ton and a half on the scene. But the black beast of the purists is by now the pretty boy of the main squares: the Easter festival in Salzburg brought him Bluebeard by Bartók, with Teodor Currentzis at the helm.
For its part, Barcelona has enjoyed its radical theatrical productions full of intimate apocalypses (in the Grec its trilogy on The Divine Comedy ), and since Temporada Alta it has cut short to bring its latest avant-gardes, like the Third Reich that it showed at the latest edition... a device that projected all the nouns in the Italian dictionary.
