The Event-packed annals of the Gran Teatre del Liceu

Jaume Tribó – El Liceu – April 12th

The pointer maestro Jaume Tribó in his shell during a performance of Il burbero di buon cuore, Barcelona 2012

All the world’s leading opera houses have shown an interest in rediscovering their past. Nearly all the larger ones compiled annals methodically and many published them in the 1930s. The Liceu did not. Even today any researcher or opera-lover looking for a particular date or list of performers or titles is in for a hard time. The reason, perhaps, is that the Liceu was under private ownership: it was the last big private theatre and was run by one firm after the other, none of which left anything behind. When occasionally data were compiled, the initiative always arose, not from the Liceu itself, but from private individuals, each of whom took a different approach. The annals of an opera house should cover just three subject areas: dates, titles and performers. Under each heading the research, and consequently the information as well, should be exhaustive. Nor should it be confined to operas – as the Scala has done with impunity – but include all the entertainment offered, day by day. Before the second fire which gutted the Liceu (on 31 January 1994), I undertook what already promised to be a slow and laborious task: that of compiling the annals. The work has attained a magnitude far beyond my original expectations.

Though not yet complete, the resulting annals are of gigantic proportions. Suffice it to say that an impressive total of 432 shows were staged during the very first season, 1847-1848. There was something every day. Many Sunday bills included three performances: a concert in the morning, a comedy in the afternoon, and an opera in the evening. Nor did the pace let up in summer and, if ever there was no show on one particular day, it was always the result of happenstance. In the first fourteen years, when the Liceu was housed in its first building, opera was not yet the most frequently performed genre. Only 25% of all shows in the first season were operas. The Liceu was not yet an opera house but a theatre where all genres had their place, first and foremost plays in verse or prose and dance. The most frequent programme was a medley that nearly always comprised a “symphony” — title and composer not specified —, a drama or comedy, an Andalusian-style dance performance and, to conclude, an amusing sketch (“un divertido sainete”), equally devoid of title or author.

The first opera – Donizetti’s Anna Bolena – was not staged until thirteen days after the theatre was inaugurated. The audience was as interested in romantic ballet as it was in opera. Giselle and the great ballets of Cesare Pugni were often labelled “a great, spectacular dance performance” (“gran baile espectaculoso”). The empresarios who put on plays tried to lure the audience with intriguing, spine-chilling titles such as Fabio el novicio (Fabio the novice), La caverna invisible (The invisible cavern) or El bandido incógnito en las ruinas de los templarios (The unknown bandit in Templars’ ruins).

The most curious feature of the shows held in the Liceu’s first building were certain routines which some researchers have considered too lowbrow to bring to light. I refer to the acts used to fill in the intermissions, which were performed by conjurors, equilibrists, magicians, acrobats, tight-rope walkers, trapeze artists, illusionists and others who defy definition. This custom went on till 1861, the year of the first fire.

In some of these routines, the Liceu reached an all-time low. One was the performance in 1851 by a Monsieur Lebeau, an animal imitator, which must be one of the most surprising episodes in the Liceu’s history. Besides mimicking five different birds, he imitated “a piglet’s grunt, a neighing horse, the song (sic) of a dog, and that of a chicken”. According to the reviews, the show was a great success and M. Lebeau even whistled like a canary by way of an encore. Other forms of amusement deserving of mention included improvisations on subjects suggested by the audience, pranks to mark 28 December (the equivalent of April Fool’s Day), when the bill was also written in verse, and Christmas raffles, in which members of the audience could win a live turkey. Here are a few more of the endless list of anecdotes.

• The contemporary press announced a performance by El trípede (The Tripod) or “three-legged man” (sic).
• 1850: The Barcelona city councillor in charge of one show refused to authorize an encore of the Rondeña (part of a flamenco dance show), thereby sparking off such violent turmoil that he ordered the show to be interrupted. On leaving the theatre, he was attacked by a group of furious spectators on Carrer de la Boqueria and needed protection from the Catalan police.
• RIGOLETTO. The premiere of the opera on 3 June was cut short at 10.30 p.m. because of an accident that was “as horrible as it was regrettable”. During her Act III duet with the baritone, soprano Filippina Crescimano rashly went too close to the footlights on either side of the prompter’s box. Her dress caught fire and in her terror she rushed to the back of the stage, thus further fanning the flames. Some of the musicians climbed onto the stage to help her. The baritone Domenico Mattioli finally extinguished the fire by picking up a cloth from a table and wrapping her in it. The curtain dropped and the authorities ordered the performance suspended. Signora Crescimano only suffered slight burns to her right arm. The reviewer for the Diario de Barcelona reassured readers that her face was not disfigured.
• A lady from Cadiz gave birth to “a bouncing boy” in the corridor behind the stalls. The baby was aptly christened Eliseo.
• ERNANI. At the start of Act IV, four stagehands fell from a considerable height when the rope that served to raise the curtain broke. While the chorus began singing, the curtain remained half-up and half-down, raising protests from the audience until it was discovered that an accident had occurred and the show was interrupted. One of the men died an hour later and another survived only a few days. An investigation was held and it was decided that the rope must be replaced every four years. Only one of the four, Jaume Goula, fully recovered from his injuries and was able to return to work six months later.
• On 7 November 1893, just as the new season was getting underway with a performance of Rossini’s William Tell, the opera house was the scene of a bomb attack which caused great consternation in the city. During the recitative that precedes the Act II trio between tenor, baritone and bass, the anarchist Santiago Salvador threw two Orsini bombs into the stalls. They fell in row 13, killing twenty members of the audience. Salvador was executed the following year.
• The season was due to open with a performance of Mercadante’s IL GIURAMENTO. Rehearsals were already underway when the show had to be cancelled because the Italian soprano, Carolina Ferni, was suffering from a severe cold. As the coach bringing her to Barcelona had crossed the river Fluvià at Bàscara (about 75 miles north of the city), water had flooded into it and the singer, her sister Teresina and other members of the Italian company were all soaked. According to the press report, Signora Ferni was unable to take part in the performance “as a result of the damp conditions she endured on the way”.
• RIGOLETTO. The tenor Angelo Masini had to do six encores of “La donna è mobile”. It was common practice to demand encores at the time, but to repeat the same number six times was unheard of. The reason for the audience’s insistence was that on each occasion Masini rounded off the piece with a different cadenza.
• LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR, starring the Polish soprano Regina Pinkert. The press reported that “A member of the secret patrol squad dropped the revolver he wore on his belt. On hitting the ground, the gun went off, wounding him in the right foot”.
• 28-III-1921 MANON by Massenet. On the morning of 28 March, the Diario de Barcelona published a report of the premiere which was to take place that same evening. Fortunately it gave an enthusiastic account of all the singers’ performances.

The attempts made, from the 19th century onwards, to draw up an inventory of the shows staged at the Liceu were all influenced by the notion that the Liceu dedicated itself exclusively to opera, or possibly to opera and ballet. The clear objective of these praiseworthy endeavours was to draw up a list of all the operas performed in their entirety. And it is worth stressing “in their entirety” because throughout the 19th century, performances of operatic music often consisted of an assortment of single acts taken from different titles. The serata d’onore, an evening in honour of some contemporary diva or divo, was another widespread custom which continued into the 1950s. As late as 1952, a performance made up of acts from Fidelio, Tannhäuser and Siegfried was put on to pay tribute to Gertrude Grob-Prandl and Max Lorenz. We would give a distorted view of the Liceu if we were to concentrate solely on operas and ignore these tributes and the many other types of show: the wide array of comedies and dance spectacles organized in the first fourteen years, the great ballets, the Andalusian dance shows such as La sandunga de Triana, La gachona resaláa and El rumbo macareno, the magical comedy shows, zarzuelas, concerts and so on. Moreover, many great artists and ensembles have appeared at the Liceu without taking part in an opera: Carlos Latorre, Bárbara Lamadrid, Pablo Sarasate, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Pau Casals, Heitor Villa-Lobos, John Barbirolli, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell, Maria Callas (still billed as “Meneghini-Callas”, from the name of her first husband), the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras, Igor Markevitch,  Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti, Lorin Maazel, Lluís Llach, Pierre Boulez, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, and many more. The list of dancers would be endless but there are a few names we cannot pass over such as Anna Pavlova, Vatslav Nijinski, Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev.

The Liceu has remained active from its official opening on 4 April 1847 right up to the present day and any interruptions were due to exceptional events. On 9 April 1861, for instance, the entire auditorium and stage were destroyed in the first fire but just one year and eleven days later the Liceu reopened in still more sumptuous premises. The famous bomb attack of 9 November 1893 was remembered for generations. Fortunately its memory has faded at last and there are no longer patrons who prefer to sit on the left-hand side of the stalls because the right was “where the bomb dropped”. The next time artistic activities were suspended was during the Civil War (1936-1939), though a few months before General Franco’s troops entered the city, zarzuelas were being staged on a daily basis to create a false impression of “life as usual”.  The second fire, on 31 January 1994, again gutted the entire auditorium and stage, causing life at the Liceu to be put on hold once more. Five years later the opera house had been rebuilt in its present form. And the most recent interruption has been due to the Covid virus, though the Liceu has struggled to maintain part of its programme despite severe restrictions on the size of the audience, which has sometimes been limited to 500.

So we have our building and our permanent orchestra and chorus and can take pride in the great artists who are part of our glorious past and present. We can also congratulate ourselves on our programmes, the fruit of 174 years of history, which reflect the novelties of each successive era. Some people maintain that certain titles that have been staged at the Liceu were unfit for an opera house like ours and should be passed over in silence. We do not agree. We cannot change the past and to ignore it is to bury your head in the sand. Demystifying the Liceu will not rob it of its dignity. Let us also recall that in the 19th century the theatre was frequented, not only by humans, but by cats and dogs who lived there during the day and left when the audience arrived. And there were also a few dogs who came with their masters and mistresses. The day before the official opening, the acting mayor, Valentí Esparó, drew up a motley set of rules including “Dogs may not be brought into the theatre”. The very existence of this ban confirms that people did take dogs to the theatre: besides the stray dogs, there were also dogs who attended the show with their owners. Perhaps the history of the Liceu should include a small section devoted to animals, a sort of bestiary.  In 1858 a “huge dog” fell from the fourth tier during the second act of Rossini’s William Tell and in 1872 “a small dog” did the same, but from the third tier: both were killed. Then in 1875 a cat did credit to the reputation of its species by falling from the fifth tier onto the balustrade round the orchestra pit, bouncing off an unoccupied seat, and fleeing from the stalls miaowing.

You can consult the Liceu Annals here.