Premiere Nights

I detest Mozart. His music seriously gets on my nerves. Naturally I don't like Verdi, Rossini, Handel, Monteverdi, Puccini or Bellini or Wagner. … In a nutshell, I can't stand opera. Even though I undoubtedly belong to the select band of old-timers who have watched the most performances at the Liceu.

I was born in 1924 and have been going to that opera house since I was eighteen. I am now ninety-two. I don't think I have missed a single premiere in all those years or that there is a single divo or diva I haven't heard sing. You will probably regard this as a privilege, but I can tell you, as far as I am concerned, going to the Liceu has always been a torture. And then you will ask: if she doesn't like opera, why did this good lady spend half her life going to the Liceu? Well, you know, things didn't used to be that easy, once.

I am referring to people of our social standing.

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The first time I went to the opera, it was with my parents. I had just had my eighteenth birthday, and celebrated my coming out at a big party in the house where we then lived on the Passeig de la Bonanova, and Mama thought I was now of an age to go to the Liceu to see an adult performance. I had never been, and naturally enough, I was thrilled at the idea of going out at night and dressing up for the theater. In those days when almost everything was banned, there was very little in the way of entertainment, and the only distractions on hand were going to Mass or the dressmakers, or doing charity work.

Mama, who was very clever, didn't choose any ordinary day to take me, she decided on a night at the end of January when a gala performance was planned in honor of the Generalísimo that would bring together the city's great and the good. In those days, our family belonged to an exclusive circle of politicians, military, bankers, and businessmen, and as the daughter of one of the country's most important Catalan industrialists, I had to experience the rite of initiation of a night at the Liceu, and being paraded in all my finery before my peers. You can't imagine how excited I was! I had never attended a big society event or seen Franco in the flesh — Papa was full of praise for the man — and I was so nervous I lost my appetite. We're talking about the year 1942. The war that had forced us to leave Barcelona and set up home in Camprodon to escape the anarchist patrols had only finished three years ago.

The program to pay homage to the Caudillo comprised the first and second acts of Madame Butterfly and the second act of Lohengrin. Mama was passionate about Wagner, whom she believed to be much superior to Verdi, and was of the opinion that Lohengrin was an excellent choice. Wagner's music was epic and patriotic, she said, like the decimation of the reds that Franco had pursued to protect us from communism and the "Jewish-Masonic conspiracy." I think I had heard the occasional piece by Puccini and Wagner on the radio at home, but never a whole opera (I don't even recall whether they broadcast operas in those days), and whenever I had the choice, I preferred piano concertos by Beethoven or Schubert, that were more in tune with the state of mind of the young girl I was at the time: an eighteen-year-old innocent who went to Mass in the morning and enjoyed secret fantasies of Errol Flynn by night.

That evening the Liceu looked splendid, so brightly lit and bedecked with flowers. The façade had been covered in small lights, as if it were Christmas, and the entrance had been decorated with plants and bay trees. I too looked gorgeous, in a...