Are you more of Wagner or Verdi?
As? Why do you ask?
Barcelona was always divided between Verdians and Wagnerians.
I suppose that the city is also divided between those who dream of being and those who enjoy being what they are.
Are the Wagnerians not right-wing?
I would say that Verdi and his work are in this world and recreate life: people who live and drink, eat, get sick... die. Instead, Wagner creates fantasy universes...
Isn't that fantastic?
Well, Wagner is kind of like being a little... high. To live it you have to connect with those dreams until you become part of them.
¿Wagner, sir Thomas?
I would take Verdi to my deserted island.
And at the Liceu?
I'd love to. But it is one of those great opera houses in which the theater is important, as much as the author or the work itself...
In what sense?
Also directing at the Vienna Opera or La Scala in Milan is being in everyone's conversation those days: from the taxi driver to the patron and it's not like... well, let's say Canada, where operas are delicatessen for four. In those cities with the soul of opera: it's like food, bread and butter. And it is also my life.
Will the opera survive us?
I think that in the time of the non-face-to-face the great asset of the opera is that it requires a huge amount of face-to-face attendance.
Is it still the total show?
If you compose it for everyone and not just for some, it will always be so.
We had hundreds of theaters and look...
But the opera –not the cinema– requires everyone to be there, to experience it. It is not solved with a screenshot and you have already seen it. It's not a rally. It's a party. And that festive requirement makes everyone, in those opera capitals, experience it as the Champions League final.
Why do you like opera?
Because it is chaos, it is life, it is being there.
Time is not flexible; our perception of him, yes...
All my music. Music, art, revolves around that fight to impose ourselves on the inexorable time, because physical time only remains for us to resign ourselves to it passing...
At least for now.
Instead, our perception of time is cultural and teachable. The infallible machine to travel in time is culture, art, music. The musician can create magic to overcome his dictatorship.
As?
Music is that key that takes us to the past, to the future and to worlds that have not existed, delving into the moment.
When was the last time you defied time?
Well, a little while ago directing The Knight of the Rose by Strauss. I swear I felt like I was in the Austro-Hungarian empire with all my musicians... What power and pleasure!
When was the last time you were in a disco?
In the eighties I went every night and I was fascinated how I could live in other worlds there. Do you see how time melts over my memories thanks to music like Dalí's clocks? Last Saturday I also went to a disco... and I enjoyed the eighties.
Reggaeton?
I am now composing for classical guitar. I have learned a lot from my student Francisco Coll, I adore Segovia and I love Adam Green and Sean Shibe...
I heard him play Mompou.
Its colors are magnificent. And... who can not love flamenco?
Is the piped music in all the elevators noise pollution or relaxing?
It's music and it's blessed wherever it comes from: over the hum of city traffic or airport loudspeakers in your headphones. Blessed music always.
His pop artist? Shakira?
My favorite pop artist is Kate Bush and in classical, Bach and Janácek. And I adore plastic art: 18th century French painting and today, Mark Christian.
And in words?
Music is so ethereal – it is literally air – that it can evoke worlds, like painting, even those that will never exist. Words only exist in their relationship with the object. So with the air of music and its freedom without material referent we can create those unsuspected worlds...
How do you know?
My father was a literary translator and my mother an art historian, an expert on Dalí. As a child I suffocated without music: I needed air. But I understood Dalí's deserts where each object is beyond its material referent. And I had books and art, thank you, to live them.
