Manon Lescaut It always works if this opera is presented in a production that perfectly captures its essence: an apotheosis of melodrama, like virtually the entirety of Puccini's catalog. In the last twenty years, the Liceu has presented three different productions of Puccini's third opera, based on the novel The History of the Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut of theabbot Prévost. A story also inspired by the operas of Auber, Massenet, and Henze. Now, Puccini's version has returned to the Rambla. A production of the Frankfurt Opera, with stage direction by Àlex Ollé and part of his usual team: set designer Alfons Flores, costume designer Lluc Castells and lighting designer Joachim Klein.

Amilcare Ponchielli's most famous opera is hardly defensible. Leaving aside the intensity of some arias, The Mona Lisa It lacks the dramatic appeal necessary for a staging that transcends the most blatant historicism. Arrigo Boito's pretentious libretto, disguised under the pseudonym of Tobia Gorrio, offers nothing more.

It was on everyone's lips that the Catalonia Opera Foundation It made history by adding its first Wagner to its extensive list of programmed titles, spanning more than forty years. And, although Der fliegende Holländer It draws heavily on German Romanticism of the first third of the 19th century, and the Nibelungs are still a distant memory. Wagner always demands an extra artistic effort, which in this case he hasn't quite achieved. It's not that this spectacle has foundered, but sadly it hasn't reached its full potential, if we may use the nautical metaphors that precede the fourth opera in Wagner's catalogue.