From tomorrow until 12 April, Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela offers 8 performances of the opera Juan José, a masterpiece by Pablo Sorozábal with a libretto by the composer himself based on the work of Joaquín Dicenta, who himself was inspired by a real event.
With musical direction by maestro Miguel Ángel Gómez-Martínez and stage direction by José Carlos Plaza, in this popular lyric drama, in the proletarian sense, far from the folkloric, Sorozábal portrays the underworld of Madrid in the past, where illiteracy and ignorance brought to the surface human miseries, grudges, fears, betrayals and mistrust, repeating themselves from father to son in an endless spiral.
Stage director José Carlos Plaza points out that this opera “plunges us into the very heart of misery and illiteracy. Having been denied access to knowledge, these people are incapable of discerning or reflecting on what is happening to them and its causes, and this has turned them into beasts”. He adds that “like animals, they feel only primal sensations: pain, hunger, cold, disease, aggression, hatred…. The concepts of “morality” or “ethics” have ceased to have any meaning”.
The Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid will conduct a cast made up of Juan Jesús Rodríguez, Luis Cansino, Saioa Hernández, Carmen Solís, Vanessa Goikoetxea and Alba Chantar, among many other great voices of Spanish opera. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
