Valencia’s Big Bet

Almost ethereal, Valencia’s Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía stands at the edge of the Mediterranean, its egg-shaped dome looking something like an ocean liner’s hull or a spaceship. Designed by leading architect and native son of the city Santiago Calatrava, the building is a gleaming composition: curved walls, rolling stairways; turquoise reflecting pools topped by a detached, feather-like roof. But the Palau is more than an architectural masterpiece. An opera house that cost in the neighborhood of €325 million to build, it is also the riskiest element in the city’s gamble to become one of Europe’s major cultural destinations.

Already, it’s been quite a ride. The season opened last October in grand fashion, with orchestra maestro Zubin Mehta conducting Fidelio, Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera, and tenor Peter Seiffert — deemed “the best Florestan [Fidelio‘s leading man] performing today” by one critic — leading a stellar cast. On Dec. 2, however, a mechanical failure of the hall’s stage works that forced the cancellation of several performances demonstrated just how risky and tenuous such triumphs can be. A temporary fix has salvaged the season, but the brief hiatus turned the spotlight on the scale of Valencia’s ambition.

Can a new opera house, spectacular though it may be, really transform a city best known for its paella and beaches into a top arts center? Can Calatrava’s magnificent edifice produce the Bilbao effect — doing for Valencia what Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum did for the industrial Basque city to the north?

The Palau is certainly a worthy effort and just part of Valencia’s quest, one that’s even bolder than Bilbao’s famous gamble. The opera house is the final piece of the immensely popular City of Arts and Sciences, a complex of beautifully integrated white buildings, most designed by Calatrava, that includes a planetarium with IMAX cinema and laser dome, a science museum, a botanical garden and Europe’s biggest marine park. “An art museum draws a fairly narrow audience, while the City of Arts and Sciences appeals to a much wider range of people,” says Julio López Astor, director of the Tourist Office of Spain in Chicago.

Fair enough, but, with its three halls seating 4,000 people, including some 1,700 in the main auditorium, the Palau is the crown jewel. Calatrava himself described the 40,000-sq-m building as the culmination of 14 years’ work. “This project is the most intense, the one I’ve devoted most time to,” he said. “It represents a correlation between spectator, musician and artist.” With its ample rehearsal and performance spaces, as well as its fine acoustics (Calatrava brought in his own team to ensure their quality), the Palau holds obvious appeal for any musical performer or fan.

Calatrava’s passion for the project is particularly notable because opera is, in many places, a dying art. Long-established houses like Milan’s La Scala, Berlin’s Deutsche Oper and even New York City’s Met struggle to fill seats. The reasons for opera’s slow decline are legion. Classical music critic and consultant Greg Sandow points to governments’ dwindling support of the arts, a paucity of singers with the ability to perform the standard repertoire, and above all, audiences that look elsewhere for entertainment.

So why did Valencia make this high-stakes bet? Status has something to do with it. In a world where opera is still seen as the highest of high culture, a striking new theater immediately heralds grand ambition. “Valencians are trying for something iconic,” says Nicholas Payne, director of Opera Europa, the chief organization for professional opera companies and festivals on the Continent. “They’re looking at Madrid and Barcelona, and saying, ‘We’re just as good.'”

Whatever its arriviste pretentions, Valencia may also represent a new model for successfully producing opera. A stunning new building worked for Copenhagen, where the Henning Larsen house, with its roof plated with 24-carat gold, is already a destination for both tourists and native aficionados. Oslo is currently completing its own dramatic hall, located at the edge of a fjord, that promises a pristine acoustic environment. The Palau is also taking risks on unusual performances. Classic crowd-pleasers like Don Giovanni and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle appear in new garb: La Fura dels Baus, the avant-garde theater troupe best known for its choreography of the Barcelona Olympic Games’ opening ceremonies, is staging the latter. Inventive new works are being set as well: Milos Forman, for example, is building Well-Paid Walk — what he calls a jazz opera — around pieces of old movie footage. Such attention to modern entertainment is necessary, says Payne, to attract a younger crowd. “New audiences want theatricality,” he says.

But Valencia’s biggest selling point is, quite simply, the talent it has attracted. Classical music legend Lorin Maazel is the opera company’s music director and Mehta is its orchestra director, but Helga Schmidt, the former artistic director of London’s Royal Opera House, is the Palau’s artistic director and its driving force. Once Mehta heard Schmidt was heading Palau, he says, “I was convinced that the artistic quality would be extremely high.”

It is Schmidt’s vision not just to attract stars from opera’s firmament but also to seek out talented lesser-known artists, to create a world-class house that also provides opportunities for young performers to develop. Maazel personally conducted all auditions for the opera’s musicians, first in Spain, then around the world, considering some 5,000 performers to find the 90-plus musicians from over 25 countries that now make up what Mehta calls his “virgin orchestra.” Indeed, most of the musicians are in their early 30s, and some have never played in opera orchestras before. The opera company has a permanent troupe of approximately 10 singers, with stars coming and going for different performances, following the traditional European model.

This season’s performances, which end on May 19 with Well-Paid Walk, are completely sold out, but these are early days, and some flashy new theaters like the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Southern California have failed to draw anticipated sellout audiences. Opera expert Payne suggests that Valencia may not achieve its goal of becoming a world opera mecca, but could become a fine regional draw. “Maybe it won’t be able to compete with Milan,” he says, “but it could be a Rome. It might not be Paris, but it could be a Lyons.”

But those involved with the Palau believe they’re onto something big. Richard Casero, a trombonist and native Valencian who, with his wife, flutist Magdalena Martínez, was reluctant to return to his hometown after working with better-known opera companies in London and Paris, says: “I was won over by the commitment to the quality of the musical performance. In the opera world, Valencia is a city of the future.”