La Edad de Plata
(The Silver Age - Spanish Diptych)
Goyescas and El retablo de maese Pedro
Music: Enrique Granados / Manuel de Falla
Libretti: Fernando Periquet, Manuel de Falla
Additional material: Paco López
(Madrid,
29 January 2026)
reviewed by Miccone
Just between ourselves, I confess that I rolled up at Teatro de la Zarzuela with that mixture of excitement and apprehension that always accompanies encounters with rare yet much-loved works. Goyescas and Master Peter’s Puppet Show are not exactly regular guests on our stages, and we appreciate any opportunity to see them again. Yet perhaps for that very reason, it hurts all the more when they are not allowed to speak for themselves.
La Edad de Plata (‘The Silver Age’) is a production by Paco López, produced by Ópera de Oviedo and Teatro Cervantes de Málaga in 2023, now transferred to Madrid. Under this menu, two very different dishes are served up, accompanied by Granados’s Marcha de los vencidos and Danza de los ojos verdes, and Falla’s Psyché. So this is not a mere double bill, but something more ambitious: a uchronia, or alternate history. Yes, with every breath. We’re presented with an imaginary evening at Ignacio Zuloaga’s Paris house in the 1920s, where Granados (not drowned in 1916), Falla, Stravinsky, the Princess de Polignac, poets, dancers, spectres, Nazis at the city gates, and – if my eyes don’t deceive me – even History herself strolling across the stage, all come together.
Unfortunately, the actual scenario oscillates between high-school didacticism and melodramatic sensationalism. The falangist anthem Cara al Sol, No-Do newsreels, and Zuloaga’s spectacular 1940 portrait of Franco all make an appearance – fifty years after his death, the Generalissimo continues to appear with British punctuality in almost every subsidized show; while even Granados, who had the discourtesy to die twenty years before the Civil War, ends up orbiting Francoism through the art of retrospective dramaturgy. I propose we institute a little drinking game: a shot for every time the dictator appears on stage. The performance would certainly gain in energy.
But credit where credit is due: Álvaro Albiach’s passionate and precise conducting invited us to forget everything as soon as the enchanting score of Goyescas began. I have always thought it unjust to dismiss this opera as ‘bad’. It is not bad, as some 2026 critics still dare to maintain: it is fragile. And fragile things are not saved by shaking them about. The respect manifest in the musical direction and the dedicated art of the four lead singers (Mónica Conesa as Rosario, Alejandro Roy as Fernando, César San Martín as Paquiro, and Mónica Redondo as Pepa) allowed us to fully enjoy the performance. Even López’s dramaturgy, so elaborate on paper, proved less intrusive than feared in this first half. The Parisian party, the ghosts of memory, the biographical allusions … all unfolded with relative discretion. Nothing prevented Granados from unleashing his essence. And when Goyescas breathes, he truly breathes.
Unfortunately, the spell was broken after the interval.
El retablo de maese Pedro (‘Master Peter’s Puppet Show’) is a work demanding miniaturist precision and handcrafted charm. It is chamber theatre, akin to fine toymaking: every gesture counts, every timbre matters. Turning it into a platform for an audiovisual display with dreadful, endless projections – justified, or so we’re told, by some remote connection to Luis Buñuel – was like hanging a PowerPoint presentation on a Renaissance panel. Instead of the expected puppets, the film show could be compared to a farcical version of Pedro Muñoz Seca’s parody historical melodrama La venganza de don Mendo, perhaps intended as a veiled homage to the massacres in Paracuellos de Jarama by the Republican side during the Civil War, where the playwright lost his life…?
This farrago fell squarely into the category of theatrical pedagogy that explains everything, underlines everything, and consequently leaves nothing to the imagination. The increasingly obvious historical references culminated in a final moral – in capital letters – on the screen. The more the conceptual apparatus piled up, the less space there was for the only essential element – the music – to do its job. Cervantes and Falla are already reflecting here, with infinite intelligence, on theatrical illusion. It did not seem useful to add an instruction manual.
And this time, the three performers could do little to salvage this mazed Retablo. Having said which, I must acknowledge the exquisite skill which Pablo García-López dedicated to Maese Pedro; the masterly Gerardo Bullón doing his best as Don Quijote and Manuel de Falla; and Lidia Vinyes-Curtis, a committed Trujamán (the boy-narrator of the original) of exquisite musicality. Nor would it be fair not to mention the Jesús Ruiz’s fine costumes, and Paco López’s own lighting plot. Goyescas achieved some undeniably beautiful moments, not least through the significant advocacy of Olga Pericet’s choreography.
I bid farewell, as so often, crying out in the wilderness: why does Teatro de la Zarzuela do the bidding of Teatro Real, which receives a ton of public money every season, only to fail to stage Spanish-composed operas? Instead of Goyescas, wouldn’t it make more sense at La Zarzuela to see Chapí’s El cortejo de la Irene?; instead of El retablo de maese Pedro, wouldn’t Sorozábal’s El alguacil Rebolledo make more artistic sense? But there we are!
© Miccone and zarzuela.net, 2026
| Casts: Goyescas: Rosario – Mónica Conesa; Fernando – Alejandro Roy; Paquiro – César San Martín; Pepa – Mónica Redondo. El retablo de maese Pedro: Don Quijote – Gerardo Bullón; Maese Pedro – Pablo García-López; Trujamán – Lidia Vinyes-Curtis; Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid (titular del Teatro de la Zarzuela); Coro del Teatro de la Zarzuela (d. Antonio Fauró); Álvaro Albiach (c.); Paco López (dir. dramaturge, des. and l.); Jesús Ruiz (cost.); Olga Pericet (choreo.); José Carlos Nievas (audiovisuals) Production by Ópera de Oviedo and Teatro Cervantes de Málaga, 2023 |
 |
en español
homepage - zarzuela.net
2/II/2026