Il prigioniero / Suor Angelica at Barcelona Opera House Gran Teatre Del Liceu

Though the musical distance between Puccini and Dallapiccola may seem to make this double bill incongruous, in fact they share the same vision of the human grief caused by loss of freedom. Each features a prisoner: one is the captive of a political dictatorship, the other of ideological tyranny, but both are the victims of an obscurantism they cannot escape, even at the price of an illusory transfiguration. Both works also draw inspiration from the composer's own family: Iginia, Puccini's elder sister, took the veil at the Augustinian convent of Saint Nicholas, while Laura Coen, Dallapiccola's wife, was a Jew in Mussolini's Italy. Suor Angelica was the last Italian melodramma whereas the mother in the prologue to Il Prigioniero is the coryphaeus of the tragedy: Romanticism versus post-Cubist neoclassicism. But the grief is the same, the violation of feelings and rights is identical.