The Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s storied opera house, has survived two fires and a civil war. Whether it can outlive funding cuts and tension between the Spanish government and separatist-minded Catalonia is the question of the moment.
Adverse economic forces regularly batter opera houses and threaten their existence. The situation has been especially severe in Spain, one of the European countries hit hardest by the economic downturn. Huge reductions in governmental subsidies have left the Liceu and other opera houses reeling.
This month, the Liceu successfully opened its season with a new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata,” and last summer it attracted a seasoned and respected administrator, Christina Scheppelmann, formerly of the Washington National Opera, as its artistic director.
As the Spanish economy begins to recover, the Liceu is likewise striving to regain its former luster.
The task is daunting. Subsidies from all sources are down from 28 million euros, or $35 million, six years ago to €18 million today, according to Roger Guasch, the theater’s general director. Contributions from sponsors have fallen significantly as well, causing the theater’s budget to shrink to €39 million from €58 million.
In turn, performances were reduced, from more than 100 performances of 13 operas six years ago to 72 performances of nine operas during the 2013-14 season.
To save costs the company suspended operations for a month in 2011 and 2013.
Another dimension to the Liceu’s situation is political tension between Catalonia, the Spanish region of which Barcelona is the capital, and the national government in Madrid. As a cultural icon of Catalonia, the theater is inevitably drawn into the region’s pro-independence movement.
At issue is Catalonia’s mandated participation in Spain’s system of redistributing tax revenues from richer to poorer regions. As Spain’s most prosperous region, Catalonia, with 16 percent of the country’s population, accounts for 19 percent of Spain’s output.
Cuts in subsidies from the Spanish Ministry of Culture were deep for all concerned, with some opera houses faring worse than the Liceu, such as the spectacular Santiago Calatrava-designed opera house in Valencia; its music director, Zubin Mehta, resigned in protest last summer. But the Liceu’s annual subsidy from the Ministry of Culture is currently €6.5 million, whereas the Teatro Real in Madrid, which has a slightly larger budget than the Liceu’s, receives €9 million.
The disparity is said to be justified because the Liceu also receives subsidies from Catalonia and local governmental authorities, but in the eyes of Catalonians that only exacerbates the imbalance between national taxes paid and revenue returned.
This month, the region’s counselor for culture, Ferran Mascarell, speaking in the Catalan Parliament, lambasted Madrid for failing to pay the Liceu what it was owed and called its culture policies “ideologically archaic” and “profoundly negligent and inefficient.”
By also stating that Madrid maintains “a liquidating attitude” toward Catalan culture, Mr. Mascarell gave voice to allegations in Catalonia that Madrid is out to do actual harm.
Mr. Guasch, who became director of the Liceu in 2013, declines to point a finger at Madrid, saying simply that the theater will work with the subsidies available to it. As he points out, the number of performances is increasing, with 80 performances of 12 operas expected for the current season. He also succeeded in avoiding subsequent closings of the theater by enacting cost-cutting measures, including importing a production of “Porgy and Bess.”
He emphasized the need for Spanish opera houses to become less dependent on subsidies and more reliant on sponsorship. Last year, a private-public foundation was set up to facilitate corporate donations to the Liceu, but Spain has no law granting significant tax benefits to donors to cultural institutions.
Ms. Scheppelmann, who takes over in January, sees her task as maximizing artistic quality within the confines of financial realities. Born in Germany, she has spent most of her career in the United States, first at the San Francisco Opera starting in 1994 and since 2001 at the Washington National Opera, where she was artistic director. Following Plácido Domingo’s departure as director in 2011, she essentially ran the Washington company until her departure in December 2012.
Ms. Scheppelmann’s call to Barcelona cuts short a stint as chief executive of the three-year-old Royal Opera House Muscat in Oman, which was established by royal decree to promote cultural exchange. She presented a large range of offerings, including world and folk music, jazz, performances by southeast Asian ensembles and modern dance. “The people were incredibly kind, and the experience of working in another culture intrigued me greatly,” she said. “My one regret is that I couldn’t stay there another year.”
Her familiarity with the way things are done in the United States is likely to be welcome at the Liceu. “It is important for theaters to become more efficient at what they do without lowering quality,” she said.
True to her European roots, she favors government support for culture, yet she also believes that the absence of subsidies in the United States encourages a sense of responsibility for how money is spent. “The situation there is similar to a young person who doesn’t receive a big allowance from his parents.”
She also favors having an active and multifaceted board of directors. “I want a certain kind of board member who contributes to a broad range of artistic views,” she said.
Her arrival at the Liceu represents a homecoming of sorts, for she worked there as a young administrator from 1992 to 1994. “My grandmother was Spanish, and my father was born in Spain and raised in Barcelona,” she said.
“I worked at the theater at the time of the fire,” she said, referring to the blaze that destroyed the Liceu in 1994 and interrupted the theater’s attempt to end its isolation from the rest of Europe. As she notes, that goal was finally achieved under her predecessor, Joan Matabosch, who was at the Liceu from 1996 to 2013 and is currently the artistic director of the Teatro Real.
Reached in Madrid, Mr. Matabosch said his major achievement at the Liceu was “opening up the repertoire to operas never before done in Spain — from the Baroque to the present — and presenting them in modern productions by different types of directors.”
Mr. Matabosch’s departure to the Teatro Real surprised many Catalans. But the Teatro Real sought a strong artistic director to succeed Gerard Mortier, who cut back his activities for health reasons and died in March. Mr. Matabosch was attracted by the challenge of the new job but is said not to have gotten on well with the Liceu’s former general director, Joan Francesc Marco.
The Liceu’s current season was prepared by Mr. Matabosch, who is largely responsible for the next two as well. Ms. Scheppelmann said it was too soon to comment on her plans for the theater, but she did express admiration for the many new operas to emerge from the United States in the past 30 years, mentioning such composers as John Adams, Philip Glass, William Bolcom, Carlisle Floyd and Mark Adamo, and noting that such operas have had greater success in entering the repertoire than have new European operas.
She also said she wanted to set up a young artists program for singers and a program similar to the American Opera Initiative she established in Washington to give training and support to young composers and librettists.
The Liceu, which opened in 1847 with Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena,” is the only opera house in Spain with a long and continuous history. The Teatro Real dates from around the same time — 1850 — but was closed in 1925 and reopened at the instigation of the government as an opera house only in 1997; during the interim it was used as a concert hall.
As Ms. Scheppelmann points out, once the Liceu was rebuilt after its first fire in 1861, it was never renovated and consequently had antiquated stage equipment at the time of the devastating 1994 fire. That fire brought with it “the glimmer of a silver lining,” as Ms. Scheppelmann put it, since the rebuilt theater emerged with modern equipment.
The fire also brought home the Liceu’s central importance to the region’s cultural life and its social fabric. “The next day,” Mr. Guasch noted, “four governmental entities sat down and decided to rebuild the theater. It reopened in just five years.”
“It has always been a haven for great voices, including those from the region,” such as Montserrat Caballé, Giacomo Aragall and Victoria de los Ángeles, Ms. Scheppelmann said. “But after the fire there was a general outcry — I was there. The reaction of the population from the city and the region was absolutely amazing.”