Are you more of Wagner or Verdi?
How? Why are you asking me?
Barcelona is still divided: Verdians or Wagnerians.
I guess the city is also divided then between those who dream of being and those who enjoy being who they are.
Aren't the Wagnerians right-wing?
I would say that Verdi and his work is in this world and recreates life: people who live and drink, eat, get sick... die. Instead, Wagner creates fantasy universes…
Isn't it fantastic?
Well, Wagner is like going a little...placed. To live it you have to connect with these dreams until you become part of them.
He gave it to Wagner, sir Thomas?
I would take Verdi to my desert island.
And at the Liceu?
I would love to. But it is one of those great opera houses where the important thing is the theater, as much as the author or the work itself...
In what sense?
Also conducting at the Vienna Opera or La Scala in Milan is to be in everyone's conversation those days: from the taxi driver to the patron and it's not like... Canada, as it were, where operas are a delicacy for four . In these cities with the soul of opera, on the other hand, it is like food, bread and butter. And so is my life.
Will opera survive us?
I think that in the age of the non-face-to-face world, opera's great asset is that it demands an enormous amount of presence.
Is it still the total show?
If you compose it for everyone and not just for some, it will always be.
We had hundreds of cinemas and look...
But opera – not cinema – requires everyone to be there, to experience it. It can't be solved with a screenshot and you've already seen it. Nor is it a rally. It's a party. And this festive requirement means that everyone, in these capitals of opera, live it like the final of the Champions League.
Why do you like opera?
Because it's chaos, it's life, it's being there.
Time is not flexible; our perception of him, yes...
All my music. Music, art, revolves around this struggle to impose ourselves on the inexorable time, because physical time is all we have to resign ourselves to let it happen...
At least, for now.
Instead, our perception of time is cultural and educable. The infallible machine for traveling through time is culture, art, music. The musician can create the magic to defeat his dictatorship.
With?
Music is this key that takes us to the past, to the future and to worlds that have not existed, deepening the moment.
When was the last time you defied the weather?
Well, he's been directing Strauss' The Knight of the Rose for a while. 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 went to a disco?
In the eighties I went there every night and was fascinated by how it was possible to live in other worlds there. See how time melts over my memories thanks to music, just like Dalí's clocks? Last Saturday I also went to a disco... and enjoyed the eighties.
Reggaeton?
I am now composing for classical guitar. I learned a lot from my student Francisco Coll, I love Segovia and Adam Green and Sean Shibe...
I heard him play Mompou.
Its colors are magnificent. And... who can not adore flamenco?
Is the music in all the elevators noise pollution or relaxing?
It's music and it's blessed no matter where it comes from: over the hum of city traffic or airport speakers in your headphones. Blessed music always.
Your pop artist? Shakira?
My favorite pop artist is Kate Bush and in classical, Bach and Janácek. And I love plastic art: French painting of the 18th and today, Mark Christian.
And in words?
Music is so ethereal – it's literally air – that it can evoke worlds, like painting, even ones that will never exist. Words only exist in their relation to the object. So thanks to the air of music and its freedom without material reference we can create these unsuspected worlds...
How do you know?
My father was a literary translator and my mother an art historian, Dalí expert. Even as a child I suffocated without music: I needed air. But he understood Dalí's deserts where each object is beyond its material referent. And I had books and art, thank you, to live them.
