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Interview
1 March 2020 2.00 h

Víctor García de Gomar

Artistic director of the Liceu opera house

Opera needs a revolution

Formally appointed as the Liceu opera house’s artistic director at the start of 2019, García de Gomar has now been in the job for a few months. Here he gives his vision of what the Barcelona institution should be striving for

“If opera takes on today’s problems, it can be a manual for life” “As I said before, we need the public to come out their comfort zone”

A few months since be­com­ing the artis­tic di­rec­tor of the Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house, Víctor García de Gomar (Barcelona, 1975) re­veals some of the main points of his pro­ject going for­ward as he pre­pares to launch a new sea­son on March 8.

You were ap­pointed a year ago. Have your in­ten­tions changed much since now that you are ac­tu­ally doing the job?
No, but I did have to see, once here, whether the dream I pro­posed then was still pos­si­ble. I con­tinue be­liev­ing it is, and the num­bers sup­port that dose of dis­rup­tive risk and bold­ness I spoke about a year ago. Opera is a genre that in re­cent years has been seen as a model of deca­dence, and a rev­o­lu­tion is needed. The reper­toire, mar­ginal pre­mieres, an un­chang­ing pub­lic, the evo­lu­tion of all that. This all makes me think that what is needed is for opera to be­come a liv­ing art, and we will try to achieve that through re­flec­tion, re­think­ing, and an up­date of dra­matic com­po­si­tion. The Liceu has to learn how to con­nect with that pub­lic that sees it as some­thing out of reach.
And how can that be done?
The only op­por­tu­nity we have is up­dat­ing the drama. Those un­for­get­table works that make up the canon have to gen­uinely touch on such is­sues as gen­der vi­o­lence, the cli­mate cri­sis, dif­fer­ent ways of lov­ing, de­pres­sion and lone­li­ness... They are sub­jects that opera has al­ready dealt with, some­times in a par­tial way and some­times in a more com­plete way, and there is an op­tion for am­pli­fy­ing them. The only way to con­nect with young peo­ple is with spec­ta­cle, great in­ter­pre­ta­tions, and up-to-date sub­jects.
Is set­ting up a di­a­logue with the vi­sual arts, for ex­am­ple what you did dur­ing your time at the Palau de la Música, a way of doing this?
The Liceu should not only be an opera house, but an acad­emy of emo­tion and human pas­sion. And to ef­fec­tively achieve this, we will have au­thor­i­ta­tive voices from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines that will help us to am­plify the opera ex­pe­ri­ence from po­etic, sci­en­tific, vi­sual, philo­sophic an­gles. Thus, we’ll try to make sure that there is at least one such piece every sea­son. We’ll have, for ex­am­ple Wozzeck by Alban Berg, in a pro­duc­tion from Salzburg with Matthias Go­erne in the lead role, which will be a break from what the Liceu has done in the past few years. In a way, what is needed is to re­cover the im­pulse of that opera from the be­gin­ning of the 17th cen­tury in Flo­rence with Mon­teverdi, in which all the arts come to­gether and deal with today’s prob­lems. If opera takes on the prob­lems in the world today, and the pub­lic is ca­pa­ble of recog­nis­ing it, it can be­come a man­ual for life.
Are the Liceu’s au­di­ences ready for that type of ex­pe­ri­ence?
Not only are they ready for it, it’s what they want. It is a dif­fer­ent sort of in­vi­ta­tion to the pub­lic to go from recog­nis­ing to know­ing. We need to re­cover the cu­rios­ity from those times in which the Liceu every year put on an opera by Verdi, Puc­cini or Wag­ner, after they had pre­miered only a year or two be­fore. The ca­pac­ity of those au­di­ences to be­lieve in the cre­ators of their time has grad­u­ally been lost, and we have to try to re­con­nect them by look­ing for com­posers that use a lan­guage that can con­nect with today’s pub­lic. We are in a world in which the most suc­cess­ful painters, for ex­am­ple, are those ca­pa­ble of con­nect­ing tra­di­tion with what is most cre­ative and in­no­v­a­tive now, and that pro­vides a a bit of a recipe.
The Liceu now has a pro­duc­tion of ‘Aida’. How de­pen­dent is it on the great un­avoid­able works of opera?
On a menu of nine works of opera, three bal­lets and two or three sym­phonic con­certs, we need three of them to be works that are well-loved by the pub­lic, that are part of the 25 works that make up the uni­ver­sal reper­toire. That then lets us put on works from places 26 to 100, which are also ex­tra­or­di­nary. As I said be­fore, we need the pub­lic to come out their com­fort zone and go from recog­nis­ing to know­ing. That means tak­ing into ac­count new cre­ators who are en­throned in other the­atres but who at the Liceu have still not had the op­por­tu­nity to pre­sent a sin­gle work, such as Kaija Saari­aho, Thomas Adès, Olga Neuwirth...
And what role do Cata­lan com­posers and singers play at the Liceu?
We want to have a sort of French idea of her­itage, which means re­cov­er­ing dis­tant works while at the same time fos­ter­ing works of new cre­ation. We are look­ing to re­cover tra­di­tional Cata­lan works, whether baroque, clas­si­cal, or from the 19th cen­tury, every two sea­sons. We have al­ready set­tled on a se­ries of com­mis­sions of five com­posers for the next five sea­sons. And, as far as singers go, I can re­veal that we’ll put on the Magic Flute, di­rected by Gus­tavo Du­damel, with Javier Ca­marena mak­ing his debut in the role of Tamino and [the Cata­lan singer] Núria Rial play­ing Pam­ina, in what will be her of­fi­cial in­tro­duc­tion at the Liceu. It can­not be that she, along with Marta Mathéu, Xavier Sabata and Joan Martín-Royo, has no op­por­tu­nity to ap­pear at the Liceu.
What was the first time you fell in love with opera?
The first time al­ways stays with you, and in my case it was Così fan tutte, in 1989 here in the Liceu, which co­in­cided with the cen­te­nary of its pre­miere. For a long time I slept under the poster of that per­for­mance, which I bought that night. At school, in­stead of cov­er­ing my books with pop stars, I had Bren­del, Sokolov, Pavarotti and Kiri Te Kanawa. The other kids must have thought I was a freak, but for me it was nor­mal.

in­ter­view

New kid on the block

The Executive Commission of the Gran Teatre del Liceu announced in January 2019 that Víctor Garcia de Gomar would succeed Christina Scheppelmann as the institution’s next artistic director. Garcia de Gomar was selected by a committee of nine experts from a field of 15 other candidates. Garcia de Gomar officially took up the post the following September, in time for the start of the 2019-20 season. The jury was impressed by Garcia de Gomar’s experience working at music venues, especially the Palau de la Música, where it said he gained knowledge and established a wide network of international relations in the music and opera industries. The jury also praised his creative and holistic aspects (drawing all the arts together) and his managerial talents, which it said is essential for striving to achieve a balanced budget.

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