Teatro de la Maestranza: Seville Finally Sings Its Own Operas
Why is it significant?
Find the bronze young man in an eighteenth-century coat standing beside the theatre on the Paseo de Cristóbal Colón. That is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, put up in 1991, two hundred years after his death, in a city he never visited but filled with music twice over.
Key Facts
| Place | Teatro de la Maestranza: Seville Finally Sings Its Own Operas |
|---|---|
| Address | Paseo de Cristóbal Colón 22, 41001 Sevilla, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 37.38410, -5.99670 |
| Part of Walk | Opera City: Carmen, Figaro and Don Juan in Seville's Arenal |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the bronze young man in an eighteenth-century coat standing beside the theatre on the Paseo de Cristóbal Colón. That is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, put up in 1991, two hundred years after his death, in a city he never visited but filled with music twice over.
The Teatro de la Maestranza behind him opened in 1991, part of the great building rush before the Universal Exhibition of 1992. Do not confuse its name with the bullring's. This Maestranza refers to the royal artillery workshops that stood on the site, where cannon were once made. The bullring belongs to the Real Maestranza de Caballería, an old association of noble horsemen. Two Maestranzas, two very different kinds of noise.
For centuries, the operas set in Seville were premiered in Vienna, Paris, Rome or Prague. With this house, of some eighteen hundred seats, the city finally had a stage worthy of its own legends, and Carmen, Figaro and Don Giovanni come home here regularly. There is something wonderful about watching Rosina's balcony scene a few hundred metres from the streets where Rossini imagined it.
Seville's own music is much older than the theatre. In the sixteenth century the cathedral's master of music was Francisco Guerrero, born here in 1528. His polyphony was copied and sung as far away as Mexico and Peru, and in 1588 he set off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, then wrote a lively book about the journey, pirates included. He died in Seville in 1599, during an outbreak of plague.
Three centuries later another Sevillian, Joaquín Turina, born in 1882, studied in Paris, rubbed shoulders with Debussy's generation and came home to write his Sinfonía sevillana, a portrait of the city in sound, from its riverbank to its night of festival. So the city that foreign composers dreamed about also dreamed back. Now walk north along the Paseo de Cristóbal Colón and turn right into Calle Adriano, where a small chapel stands within sight of the bullring.