The Ibero-American Festival of the Golden Age of the Community of Madrid, which is being held in Alcalá de Henares from 9 June to 2 July, will see the premiere of the opera La vida es sueño, based on the play by Calderón de la Barca, with music by the Colombian composer Juan Pablo Carreño and libretto by Iván Olano.
This international co-production (Colombia, Spain and France) can be seen at the Teatro Salón Cervantes de Alcalá (Calle Cervantes, s/n) in 2 performances on 9 and 10 June. Tickets available here.
La vida es sueño, by Calderón de la Barca, combines the metaphysical concerns about waking and dreaming with the debate about the existence or non-existence of free will. It is a simple story, but full of allegories and philosophical resonances: a king locks his son, the crown prince, in a secluded tower in the forest, fearing that a prophecy will be fulfilled and that he will become an evil king. The prince grows up, isolated and unhappy, until one day, the king decides to check if the prophecy is correct and orders his son to be put to sleep and brought to the palace. The prince suddenly wakes up as the heir to the kingdom, but he cannot shake off a sense of unreality: the suspicion that his own life – like perhaps all of them – is nothing more than the manifestation of a dream.
