Travels to Spain - Barcelona, Part III

Barcelona is a cosmopolitan city and that's what I love about it. Not only can you see the city itself if you are spending a week here, but you can also take day trips to various places. For example, I flew for a day trip from here to Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela and had lots of fun. Also I typically buy postcards with city views. Barcelona turned out to be the most expensive city to buy postcards. If anywhere else in Spain you will pay no more than 2 euros for a book of 12 postcards, here it costs 4.50. So instead I just took pictures myself and they turned out great! Even though everything is written everywhere in two languages (Spanish and Catalan), I never heard anybody speak Catalan -- everybody speaks Spanish. So you don’t need to learn Catalan, unless you really want to.

Quick Tips:

If you request brochures from the tourist office of Spain, they will send you among other things a couple of very good brochures on Barcelona. One is in the series "Walks through Europe", which suggests several walks through Barcelona, best places for panoramic views of the city as well as gives brief history of each place on the route. Another brochure is called "Barcelona" and is published by the Spanish government. Here you can find all the major places that you may want to visit with hours of operation, phone numbers and short history of the city. It also has a map of the city on the back with all the sights listed and suggests six walking itineraries. This makes it easier to plan what you can fit into your schedule and see more or less depending on how many days you are in the city. To find out what’s happening in the city the week you are planning on visiting, check out this website. This is a guide of music, theaters, restaurants, cinema, art exhibitions, and nightlife in the city. Some of the information is available in English.

Best Way To Get Around:

Barcelona is a large city, and it is difficult to cover much ground on foot. If you decide to explore ruta Modernista, you might have to do a lot of walking. Public transportation is cheap and gets you everywhere you need to go. However, metro is not easily accessible by people with disabilities. If you get sick, pharmacies may not carry your regular medications, but most people speak English, and if you can explain what's wrong with you, a pharmacist can give you a medication without a prescription from the doctor, so you can save some money and get well equally as fast.

Phone: 93 485 99 00
Website: Liceu

The theater was originally built in 1847 with the auditorium in the shape of a horseshoe and a neobaroque facade. This was the largest opera house in Europe with the seating capacity of 3,500 people. It was destroyed by fire in 1861 and rebuilt in just one year by one of the original architects. At that time Liceu by its acoustics was second only to La Scala. In 1893 there was a bomb explosion in the theater and the building was restored in 1908. The theater was again destroyed by fire in 1994 and rebuilt over a five-year period. Now it has about 2,700 seats. It opened its doors in 1999 with Puccini’s "Turandot". Also in 1999 a large red velour curtain was installed -- it was made in Malaga and is 50 feet wide by 50 feet high with a large TV screen installed above it. Before the performance, a large black letter "L" (for Liceu) in a purple circle is projected onto the curtain.

A lot of famous singers have performed here. Jose Carreras, for example, started his singing career on the stage of Liceu in the role of Flavius in "Norma" and in year 2000 he celebrated 30 years of his career in the newly rebuilt theater. Montserrat Caballe also debuted on the stage of Liceu. You can visit the theater during the day when there are no performances. The theater is very beautiful and I would highly recommend not just visiting it, but coming here for a performance in the evening when La Rambla is full of people and half of Barcelona is in the streets strolling through the city from Plaça de Catalunya to the statue of Columbus.

However if there is no performance you can visit the theater during daytime. There are guided tours at 10am and tour "express" at 11am, 12pm, and 1pm. For more information you can e-mail Liceu at visites@liceubarcelona.com or call them at 93 485 99 14.

Prices for the general visits: 5 euros – adults, 4 euros – students and seniors, free for children under 10.

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When you enter the theater through the main entrance and go up along the large staircase, before you reach the seats, there is a gorgeous hall with Greek columns, mirrors on the light green walls reflecting light of the beautiful chandeliers, large frescoes with nymphs and waterfalls, and scenes from Greek mythology on the ceiling. The floor has Greek motifs as well, and one of the arches carries the words "El Arte No Tiene Patria" (Art has no boundaries). Now you can go inside and look at the interior. There are six floors, and each balcony has magnificent unique bas reliefs. The whole theater seems to be surrounded by gold reflected of the balconies and the main cupola. The ceiling lamp can’t be really called a chandelier. It is a huge circular plafond surrounded by circular shape mirrors that reflect the red velvet of the seats. The mirrors are separated from each other by amazing gold color stucco in baroque style with garlands of flowers and leaves, which eventually become part of light blue sky.

If you decide to buy tickets for the performance, the theater website gives you information on the whole season, so you can find out what is on when you will be in Barcelona and plan accordingly. There are nine price scales for the performances and when you find the performance you would like to go to it will tell you which scale is used, this way you will know how much the tickets cost. Most opera and ballets follow scale I (one), which is the most expensive. Here the tickets prices range from 7 euros (right in my price range) to 142 euros. This link gives you a seat map with visibility points so that you can tell what part of the stage you will be able to see, however it is not extremely important where you are seating during an opera performance since there is a built in monitor next to each seat which lets you see what is going on. In addition there is also libretto of the opera in the bottom of the monitor that follows the performance in Spanish and at the top of the stage near the curtain in Catalan. So even if you have the cheapest seats (which means that most of the time you will only see half of the stage), you should still be all right.

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When I was in Barcelona, they were playing "Orfeo ed Euridice", an opera by Christoph W. Gluck. I checked Liceu’s website and tried to order tickets through www.servicaixa.com, which is like Ticketmaster in the US, however they don’t accept non-European credit cards through the web. So I e-mailed Hilton Barcelona, since I already had a reservation there and asked the concierge to reserve the tickets for me. I generated a one-time use code for my credit card and e-mailed that to her explaining that she should not worry, nobody will be able to charge my card for more than the cost of the tickets or use it beyond that purchase. Next day I had the tickets reserved for me. The day of the performance I went to the ticket office about 45 minutes before the performance started and got my tickets in an envelope that had my name, the date of the performance and the title of the opera on it. I didn’t even need to speak Spanish. It was that easy.

The opera was written in 1762, is performed in Italian and it tells the story of the old Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. The story starts when poet and musician Orpheus is grief-stricken with the death of his wife nymph Eurydice and he is told by the Cupid (or Love) that he can bring his wife back from the dead by his music but he cannot look at Eurydice until she is back in the land of the living. In his travels he struggles with demons and Furies and calms them with his music. He finally finds Eurydice but doesn’t look at her when he speaks to her. She doesn’t understand why that is, accuses him of not loving her anymore, and faints. He tries to help her and inadvertently looks at her, and . . . she dies again. Orpheus is grief-stricken again and asks the gods to help him. "Che farò senza Euridice? (What will I do without Eurydice?)" he asks. In the end, the Cupid rewards his fidelity by restoring Eurydice to life.

This opera was the first opera in which Gluck tried to stay away of all the excessive ornamentation of baroque that was mainly because of the vanity of the performers and make the opera very simple and classical. He succeeded masterfully, the music is really amazing - as the scenes change you have a full impression that you are right there with the characters - in heaven with the nymphs or in hell fighting with the Furies, you suffer with Orpheus, feel his pain and grief, and finally applaud the faith in the overcoming power of love.

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The role of Orpheus was originally written for a castrato soprano. Nowadays this role is commonly performed by a female soprano. This was the case here. The role of Orpheus was a soprano; Eurydice and the Cupid were coloraturas. The director tried to bring the opera from the 18th century to modern times by putting Orpheus and men in the chorus in modern pant suites instead of wearing the costumes of the 1700s. The decorations were very scarce, mostly done with fabric carried by the chorus. The opera should be in three acts, but here it was an hour and a half without an intermission. The whole production on the stage was in striking contrast with the unpretentiousness and simplicity of the music. This was exactly the case where if you had cheap seats, it was an added benefit, since you could hear the beautiful music and not see the awkwardness on the stage. The coloratura that was performing the role of Eurydice wasn’t very good and at some points you could hear her failing. Nonetheless, I still had a good time.