At 88, Antoni Ros-Marbà is the dean of our musicians: composer, conductor, pedagogue, and master of masters. And now it's his turn to opera, a musical form that the musician from Hospitalet de Llobregat knows perfectly, having conducted various titles from very different repertoires.

"My motto is Albert Einstein's: life is like riding a bicycle, if you stop you fall," says Antoni Ros-Marbà (Hospitalet de Llobregat, 1937). He speaks with enthusiasm, happy to be able to share the details of Benjamin in Portbou, the opera he composed, with a libretto by Anthony Carroll Madigan (1938-2020). It is Ros-Marbà's first opera, and it premieres at the Liceu, which is scheduling two performances on July 19 and 21. "Most likely it will be the first and the last, because I don't have that much time left. But you never know," he says. In fact, at 88 years old, he still pedaling, because he's working on a "very particular" requiem, from which he's removed "the horror parts" and replaced them with "poems by Catalan poets." The provisional title: Requiem in our sea.