Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu has opened its new season with an unconventional staging of Mozart’s ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’. The production transforms the stage into a giant wedding cake and dresses the cast as ingredients in a dessert recipe. Directed by Marta Pazos, it opened on a Friday and was scheduled for 13 performances through 21 July 2026, alongside an additional preview for audiences under 35. Costumes evoke chocolate bars and cherries, with honey-colored details and other sweets turning the opera into a vivid visual spectacle.
Pazos, who previously collaborated with composer Raquel García-Tomás on ‘Alexina B.’ at the Liceu, was invited by the theatre’s management to take on the project after that premiere. The cake functions as both a stage installation and a metaphor for the social hierarchy central to the opera. Decorated with pink icing and cupids, it frames a comedy that also examines abuses of power and the nobility’s authority over its servants.
The principal cast features André Schuen as Count Almaviva and Adriana González as the Countess. Luca Pisaroni plays Figaro, while Sara Blanch is Susanna. Víctor García de Gomar, the Liceu’s artistic director, has presented the opera as a critique of ruling-class arrogance on the eve of the French Revolution. Conducted by Giovanni Antonini, this staging foregrounds the unequal power relations between men and women in the story. An October interview with González in OperaWire referred to her Barcelona success and first encore, asking: “You recently had success in ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ in Barcelona and did your first encore.” The encore was of the Countess’s aria “Dove sono.”
First performed in Vienna in 1786, ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte based on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s play ‘Le Mariage de Figaro’. The plot follows Count Almaviva’s attempt to assert his former feudal sexual privilege over Susanna, Figaro’s bride, and the schemes devised to stop him. Set over a single day at a palace near Seville, the opera uses comic reversals to expose aristocratic power and the servants’ ability to outwit their employers. Pazos’s staging uses humor and visual surprise to bring those tensions into focus.
Rehearsals also had a playful side: Blanch and other cast members described performers dressed as cream and sugar, with yeast completing the theme and fostering camaraderie and laughter. Antonini has characterized the opera as both highly theatrical and strikingly modern, with Mozart’s score offering room for invention within a formal structure. González, who has appeared in seven productions of the opera, has emphasized how direction shapes fresh interpretations, with costumes and the ensemble contributing. Pisaroni has spoken about the challenge of balancing comedy with melancholy, a contrast basic to the work’s lasting appeal.
This reinterpretation at the Liceu forms part of Barcelona’s varied cultural calendar. Earlier in the year, the city hosted a major Alejandro Sanz concert at RCDE Stadium, an event covered in a report on the large-scale RCDE Stadium event. Opera and stadium concerts offer very different experiences, but both bring large and diverse audiences to the city’s cultural venues.
‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ remains among Mozart’s best-known operas, combining an intricate comic plot with criticism of social privilege. By reimagining its world as an edible fantasy, the Liceu production gives the familiar story a distinctive visual language while keeping questions of class and gender, along with power and humor, at its center.
