With Le nozze di Figaro (1786), the poet Lorenzo Da Ponte began his collaboration with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which would continue with two more operas: Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790). And it must be said that the first of the three operas is the most perfect in terms of theatrical machinery. It is logical, therefore, that Marta Pazos has enthusiastically embraced the proposal made by the Liceu. Three weeks before her debut at the Grec Theatre with The Threepenny Opera (Dreigroschenoper), the Galician director has culminated a work processed through slow cooking in terms of ideas and the overall design of the show.Pazos has based the dramaturgical concept of this Nozze di Figaro on the famous article Notes on Camp, which Susan Sontag published in 1964. The North American writer states, among other things: "The camp sensibility is one that is open to a double meaning in which things can be taken. But it is not about the familiar dichotomous construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is, rather, the difference between the thing as it means something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice." This passage is, I think, the keystone of Pazos's idea when approaching Mozart's opera. The aesthetic category of camp, markedly baroque and postmodern, permeates the show with good ideas, some close to the universe of Barrie Kosky and with occasional choreographic touches that are only partially effective. The giant cake that presides over the stage designed by Max Glaenzel – based on an idea by Pazos herself – is complemented by Agustín Petronio's costumes, markedly and deliberately grotesque, and to which, I think, the reference to packaging associated with culinary products that we all consume is superfluous. And Pazos explains the opera's story well, although he leaves a more precise portrait of the characters in the inkwell. Nevertheless, the production was liked and received more ovations than protests.

Le nozze di Figaro It is one of the most difficult operas in the repertoire. And, despite its apparent lightness, it cannot be taken lightly (excuse the redundancy). Sabadell is well known, because it is a title programmed on several occasions by the Friends of the Opera, now under the auspices of the FOC (Catalan Opera Foundation)But on this occasion, it cannot be said that the marriage between the Mozartian title that opens the Da Ponte trilogy and the Vallesan entity has fully worked.

The Polish thinker Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote that the artistic work is a conscious human activity, capable of reproducing things, constructing forms or expressing an experience, with results that can delight, excite or shock. It is beyond doubt that every staging is an artistic act that reinterprets and visualizes a previous reality, be it literary, musical, visual or a mixture of the three. In this case, the always controversial Italian director Romeo Castellucci has made an interpretation of death and life as circular cycles from the Requiem and other works by Mozart linked more or less with a death that, for the musician and in accordance with a famous letter sent to his father, was "man's best and true friend."

The Polish thinker Władysław Tatarkiewicz wrote that the artistic work is a conscious human activity, capable of reproducing things, constructing forms or expressing an experience, with results that can delight, excite or shock. It is beyond doubt that every staging is an artistic act that reinterprets and visualizes a previous reality, be it literary, musical, visual or a mixture of the three. In this case, the always controversial Italian director Romeo Castellucci has made an interpretation of death and life as circular cycles from the Requiem and other works by Mozart linked more or less with a death that, for the musician and in accordance with a famous letter sent to his father, was "man's best and true friend."

A priori, everything points to it being one of the shows of the year: a musical masterpiece, the Requiem by Mozart; an extraordinary musical director, the Italian Giovanni Antonini, founder of Il Giardino Armonico; and a highly renowned stage creator, the also Italian Romeo Castellucci, which premieres at the Liceu. All of this with the Orchestra and Choir of the Gran Teatro del Liceu, where there will be seven performances, from February 18 to 26 (on the 17th there will be a concert version performance for those under 35 at the Sagrada Família, which will be recorded by the Arte channel).