"El corazón del Teatro Real” un documental producido por Telecinco Cinema dedicado a uno de los templos más exclusivos de la música y las artes escénicas del mundo. Un lugar donde el arte se crea, interpreta y experimenta al máximo.

La película dirigida por el prestigioso realizador de documentales José Luis López-Linares nos ofrece una visión general de la historia y funcionamiento del Teatro Real, a través de materiales de archivo nunca vistos, imágenes inéditas, entrevistas y la banda sonora de fantásticas producciones representadas en el Teatro Real. Un viaje condensado en 200 años de historia por camerinos, salas de ensayo, talleres, bambalinas; que se convierte en un verdadero placer para el espectador y la oportunidad de experimentar una sucesión majestuosa de descubrimientos y revelaciones acerca de este lugar.

Como explican las productores Álvaro Augustin y Ghislain Barrois “Si queríamos descubrir los secretos de 200 años de historia del Teatro Real, teníamos que desvelar lo que el Teatro Real es en realidad: es más que un edificio, más que un grupo de profesionales y artistas, más que un puñado de obras... El Teatro Real es historia; es el relato de unos apasionados por la música poniendo en pie un sueño. Un lugar donde cada noche cuando las luces se atenúan y el público se queda en silencio emergen todas las emociones absorbidas por su histórico telón de terciopelo.”

Entre las notables figuras que aparecen en la cinta, destacan Teresa Berganza, Mario Vargas Llosa, Plácido Domingo, Juan Diego Flórez, María Bayo, Nuria Espert, Mario Gas, Javier Camarena o Rufus Wainwright.

The starting point for La Bohème and its entire creative process up until  the first performance of the opera in Turin’s Teatro Regio on 1 February 1896 is documented in minute detail in the abundant correspondence between Giacomo Puccini, his publisher and mentor Giulio Ricordi, and the librettists Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica. The latter began their stormy, yet fruitful, collaboration with this opera and went on to write the librettos for Tosca and Madama Butterfly.

Starting with the book Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger (1882-1861), originally a series of autobiographical stories published in a magazine, the two librettists, closely supervised by Puccini, built an ensemble plot in which four young bohemian artists confront financial difficulties and bad weather with humour and good cheer, finding their way in an effervescent, bustling, wintry Paris.

A love affair between one of them, aspiring poet Rodolfo, and the seamstress Mimi is cut short by her death. We watch the story move from the pleasures and dreams of youth to the solidity of real life, with all its problems.

With his sublime orchestral palette, his mastery of poetic rhythm and his enormous talent for drama, Puccini builds the personalities of the young people with his usual skill, contrasting sparkling anecdotes and fun with deep and heartfelt passions. Their short, conversational phrases are interlaced with others of much greater melodic and dramatic power. The orchestration is expressive and effective, suggesting tiny details such as flickering flames or jingling coins, while setting scenes in an almost cinematic fashion, from the chilly garret to the busy streets of Paris at Christmas time, or the loneliness and deprivation of poverty.

Past moments are evoked like flashes of memory by a masterly use of musical motifs associated with emotions or even objects to which Puccini gives great symbolic significance:  Mimi’s candle, the pink bonnet Rodolfo buys for her, Colline’s overcoat, or the muff which warms the heroine’s hands on her deathbed…

These moments which come and go in our memory, concealed and then revealed in the everyday affairs which make up our lives, are the narrative thread running through this new production of La Bohème, which was broadcast live.

The prestigious British stage director Richard Jones and the set and costume designer Stewart Laing present the opera as a series of scenes from bohemian life, without hiding the backstage work that usually goes on behind the scenes. The audience can see how the sets are changed, how different devices are used to create theatrical effects, and how props are piled up in the wings, like scraps of life crammed into our memory.

From their vantage point, the audience watches the past and present of the characters at the same time, unable to immerse themselves in the cold, bright Paris of the young bohemians because they will always see it depicted on stage. But this ‘play within a play’ device, which blurs real time and theatre time, the auditorium and the stage, drama and metaphor, will bring the audience to a richer interpretation of Puccini’s work, enhanced by viewing it from different angles, with all its images.

After its initial rejection, Verdi’s unique opera, whose action unfolds in a contemporary setting, La traviata, based on Alexandre Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias, became one of the most acclaimed works of the composer. This came about because of the universal values that are brought to light following the tragedy of a high-society courtesan -another of those left in the wake of the history of opera- who renounces even life itself to protect the honour of her lover, demonstrating with her self-sacrifice a grandeur lacking in the hypocritical bourgeois society that abused and then rejected her. A story that brought Verdi legendary status through music with a profound sense of humanity and psychological portrayal of the characters and their feelings. Behind the outward show of luxury and frivolous pleasure, the “populous desert they call Paris” hides the stark cruelty of a social class for whom everything can be bought and sold. With this backdrop of bitter transience, only Violetta stands as a classic heroine, whose sacrifice transcends love and death. These two themes that the opera revolves around are also brought to life by the staging of David McVicar, who, with his usual elegance, sets the drama in a world of romantic references while retaining an up-to-date perspective.

Madama Butterfly, one of the most staged operas in the whole world.  

The tragic story of the geisha Cio Cio San, better known as Madama Butterfly, touches all audiences. Puccini’s innate talent narrates the terrible conflict between two irreconcilable civilizations. This time the story is told from a different angle. Stage director Mario Gas sets the story in a 1930s. He narrates the poignant drama from three simultaneous perspectives for an even more marvelous experience of this classic by Giacomo Puccini.

During the quarantine period, this title will only be available in Spain, Argentina and China

In the midst of the Bicentennial and 20th anniversary celebrations, the Teatro Real revived one of its most monumental and emblematic productions of its recent history: Aida, by Giuseppe Verdi. It premiered in 1998 with the staging, scenography, and costumes by Hugo de Ana. Now we will see a restored and updated version of one of the most popular operas by the composer from Busseto.

Maestro Nicola Luisotti returns to the Teatro Real to conduct the Chorus and Orchestra of the Teatro Real with three casts of today’s best voices: Violeta Urmana, Ekaterina Semenchuk, Daniela Barcellona, Gregory Kunde, Fabio Sartori, Alfred Kim, Liudmyla Monastyrska, and Anna Pirozzi, among others. 

During the quarantine period, this title will only be available in Spain, Argentina and China

The flexibility and mobility of the staging created by the Austrian film director contrasts with the frosty atmosphere to emphasise the humanity of the characters that progress from naïve feelings to a whirlwind of situations which put their emotions to the test. Love can seriously damage the health of these two pairs of lovers, who are manipulated by the Machiavellian Don Alfonso and Despina –an odd couple working together to break up the relationships. The new staging concept delivers the recitative passages in a new way, giving the scenes more intensity and reaching a different and more ambiguous denouement in this new reading of the story. Simply magnificent and certainly cutting-edge!

Acclaimed writer Annie Proulx is the author of the libretto, offering a new approach to the short story she wrote in 1997. Conducted by Titus Engel, with stage direction conceived by Ivo van Hove.

Tom Randle and Daniel Okulitch play the cowboys Jack and Ennis in this story of forbidden love.

Der Fliegende Höllander (The Flying Dutchman) by Richard Wagner, one of the emblematic masterpieces of Romantic opera, comes to the Teatro Real. In this production by La Fura dels Baus, the conflict between good and bad, light and darkness, is but a reflection of a tormented and imprisoned soul whose free spirit has been appropriated. The Dutchman is damned, condemned to sail forever, yet his utmost desire is to be released from the inferno of his doomed vessel and return to a life on land. The story has an intense mirrorlike quality in its score, it has all the ingredients of what was to come with Wagner's mature artistry.

Das Rheingold is the first part of the colossal Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner, and this will be the second time it is seen on the Teatro Real stage since the theatre’s reopening in 1997. Pablo Heras-Casado, Principal Guest Conductor of the Teatro Real leads a cast of renowned Wagnerians including Greer Grimsley, Sarah Connolly and Samuel Youn in Robert Carsen’s bleak vision of the story. The Canadian stage director sets the prologue of The Ring in the desolation of our polluted world, the scene where the characters in this grandiose conflict will continue to be portrayed during the coming seasons.

Known as a masterpiece of Romantic opera, it was staged for the first time in the Teatro Real in June 2016, with an exceptional cast including Diana Damrau, Javier Camarena, Venera Gimadieva and Celso Albelo, with the Teatro Real Orchestra and Chorus.

This is the last opera by Bellini, who died at the young age of 34 after having triumphed in Parisian high society, and finally —in a music scene dominated by Italians, from Rossini to Donizetti, his great rival— having been commissioned to write a piece which would be first performed at the Théâtre Italien in 1835. The Sicilian composer chose a historical subject, set during the English Civil War when Cromwell and the Puritans clashed with the Royalists. He created an exciting love story featuring plenty of passion, treachery and madness. The opera centres on a typical Romantic heroine, Elvira, who finds herself inexplicably abandoned by her betrothed on her wedding day. The pain this causes her is so unbearable that she goes insane. Madness was characteristic of the Romantic era: the physical fragility and social marginalisation of the characters was a way to make the irrepressible force of their emotions more expressive. In the stylised staging by Emilio Sagi, the characters appear to be overcome by melancholy.

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New Year Concert, with music by Maurice Ravel.

New production by the Teatro Real

Principal Orchestra of the Teatro Real
(Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid)

On 26 January 2018, the Teatro Real presented the Spanish premiere of Dead Man Walking, the first opera by composer Jake Heggie, based on a non-fiction book of the same name by Sister Helen Prejean. Dead Man Walking - slang in American prisons for a prisoner on death row as he walks from his cell to the electric chair - is a reflection on the death penalty, and at the same time, a study in the redemptive power of love.

At the Teatro Real, mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato will give life to Sister Helen Prejean, protagonist of the drama, while the musical direction will be in the hands of Mark Wigglesworth, and the stage direction, by Leonardo Foglia.