Natalia Labourdette

Love, power and ambition meet on the stage of the Teatre de Liceu in Barcelona with L'Incoronazione di Poppea by Monteverdi directed by Jordi Savall and directed by Calixto Bieito.

In the early 20th century, Countess Carmen Díaz de Mendoza Aguado, inspired yet frustrated by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, sets out to write her own version but struggles with doubt, societal pressures, and a haunting inner voice, leading to her play’s failure. Decades later, fragments of her life and work resurface through obituaries and fading memories. In 2024, a modern composer seeks to rediscover and reinvent her lost opera, conversing with the echoes of the past to reclaim the Countess’s silenced voice and vision.

Based on a poem published in 1810 with more ethnographic than dramatic focus, Britten constructed a sombre parable about the conflict between the masses and the individual. The maritime atmosphere, the crudity of people’s lives and passions, and the complex, impenetrable personality of the protagonist come together in a tragedy which ferments and explodes in the din of silence and hearsay. New production of the Teatro Real, in co-production with the Royal Opera House Covent Garden of London, the Opéra national of Paris and the Teatro dell’Opera of Rome