Winterreise

A creation by Joan Fontcuberta

Joan Fontcuberta, photographer, essayist and critic, has been invited by the Liceu to take part in what is his first stage proposal. The artist, with very unequivocal and personal codes, will immerse himself in Schubert's Winter Journey to reflect on the passage of time, old age and the loss of memory. Evoking the past and memory, we will not know whether we are witnessing an illusion, a fabulation, or what really happened.  

In the world full of wounds that Winterreise presents, Fontcuberta will place his work in dialogue with the music of Schubert. Considered the composer's spiritual testament, it is one of the most important lieder cycles in the history of music and a veritable Everest for its performers. 

From considerations of loneliness, self-isolation and the deterioration of personal faculties, he will give voice to the wandering traveller and his traumas, longings, hopes and fears. An inner world devastated by misfortune, disgrace and fatality. A heart that beats only to escape from a community that oppresses it.Taking into account his iconographic universe and the amnesia of the images themselves – which mutate beyond their authors’ wishes – he seeks parallelism with a chronicler who, as a result of old age, begins to change/forget his memories. The projection of a vaporous and effervescent family album of memories makes us understand memory loss as a state of timeless suspension that, in parallel, represents a sensation of eternity in which everything you once knew has gradually disappeared, to arrive at an unknown place. It is one of our possible destinies. 

Hauntingly beautiful, Winterreise is an invitation to deep melancholy, whose episodes mark the desperate journey of a betrayed man. An immersion in Schubert's poetic universe, with Fontcuberta as a luxury guide, during which the audience is led into the abyss of this inner journey.