This is Opera

In the first episode, Ramon Gener talks of the cultural setting of Carmen by Georges Bizet—the most frequently staged and most popular French opera.

Filming takes place in locations such as Seville and Paris, describing the 1875 premiere at Paris’s National Theatre for Comic Opera, and the scandal it caused at the time.

Filming Locations: Seville

Filmed primarily in two European cities, Milan and Munich, Gener looks into the opera of Turandot, a love story set in Imperial China. The host explores the idea of how this opera represents more than a simple love story. It’s the story of an absolute success, but also a failure.

Filming Locations: Milan, Munich

The Barber of Seville presents opera as not just drama and tragedy, but also pure entertainment. In this episode, Ramon Gener explains the essential "ingredients" in Rossini’s music: staccato, crescendo, patter song, the fifth interval, and coloratura.

Filming Locations: Barcelona

At the height of his career, Puccini wrote this song to life, friendship, and love. To illustrate it, Gener travels to bohemian Paris and visits some of its most characteristic locales, such as the century-old book shop Shakespeare & Co. and Au Lapin Agile Cabaret, and visits a rehearsal of La bohème at the Paris Opera House.

Filming Locations: Paris

Richard Wagner’s last opera centers on the search for the Holy Grail, though it’s actually a spiritual voyage into the protagonist. To learn more about the Holy Grail, Gener travels to three different locations: Montségur, Valencia, and Montserrat Monastery.

Filming Locations: Montségur, Valencia, Montserrat

'Beauty for beauty’s sake' is how Gener defines this opera by Debussy, an impressionist work. To talk about love, impressionism and Debussy himself, Gener visits two pivotal French cities: Rouen and Paris.

Filming Locations: Paris

Gener explains why Bel Canto awakens so many emotions, and is so popular. Despite bel canto being born in Italy and all its composers being Italian, the viewer discovers why many of its operas are written in French and why so many of its authors moved to France to premiere them.

Filming Locations: Madrid

Gener heads to Bayreuth, the hometown of Richard Wagner, the composer of the ambitious operatic saga, The Ring of the Nibelung. This tetralogy is made up of four operas: The Rhine Gold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried, and Twilight of the Gods. Gener touches on all of them as he visits the Autostad automotive plant, walks the stage at the Bayreuther Festspielhaus (a theatre designed by Wagner himself), and converses with an expert on the composer.

Filming Locations: Bayreuth

Rome is the setting for this episode, and the city where the "Tosca" story unfolds. To unveil these elements, Gener seeks help from students of the Rome Film School.

Filming Locations: Rome, Barcelona

To love and to be loved is the main theme in Verdi's La traviata, based on The Lady of the Camellias by the younger Alexandre Dumas, and inspired by the courtesan Marie Duplessis. Paris is the backdrop for this episode. On its streets, Gener interviews random people who tell him about their experiences with love and how it transformed their lives.

Filming Locations: Paris

Gener heads to Cadaques on the Costa Brava to talk about a love story, of a love beyond death—what Tristan and Isolde felt for one another. Again, Gener interviews anonymous people about their personal love stories.

Filming Locations: Cadaqués

To bring to light the famous seducer, Gener delves into the world of the night, to get to know the techniques for hooking up used by today’s Don Juans.

Filming Locations: Barcelona

Rigoletto is not just the story of a curse. It’s also a story of oppressors and the oppressed. Giuseppe Verdi wrote it when he was 40, a critical point for many—a time of changes and maturity. To explore the opera's symbols, Gener travels to the island of Menorca. At 40, Verdi places all his hopes, dreams, and frustrations into the lead character of this work.

Filming Locations: Menorca

Manon is a young Parisian woman who dreams of fame and riches. One day, Des Grieux crosses her path, an attractive gentleman, but with a defect—he’s not rich. This is the premise behind Massenet’s opera based on the Abad Prévost novel of the same name, which explores the conflict between head and heart.

Filming Locations: Barcelona, Madrid

Over 24 hours, Gener roams about the village of Aichach in Bavaria and discusses one of romanticism’s first operas, The Freeshooter, written in 1820. The opera takes place in a German village similar to Aichach, an opera through which the author tried to convey his love for a country's roots, traditions, legends, and culture.

Filming Locations: Aichach

"Theatre is life" is the verism motto behind this beautiful opera. Gener explores Pagliacci, in which fiction and reality intermingle and nothing is as it appears.

Filming Locations: Platja d'Aro

Tchaikovsky and Pushkin—the greatest examples of Russian Romanticism—speak to us about impossible romances, homosexuality, dandies, love letters, and duels of honor. Gener goes to the Liceu Conservatory to collaborate with some aspiring musicians.[22]

Filming Locations: Barcelona

Gener discusses Beethoven and the composer's main drives in life- love, injustice, and freedom.

Filming Locations: Madrid

In London, Gener reveals how Handel managed to make England love opera. This is an episode about a competitive man who achieved everything he aimed for and converted opera into something Londoners could enjoy.

Filming Locations: London

Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a leading example of musical classicism, and its main topic, narrated as a comedy, is infidelity.

Filming Locations: Empúries

Based on the Oscar Wilde play, Richard Strauss wrote a troubling, uneasy score that portrays man's basic instincts. It is a story about obsession, curiosity, and desire for the forbidden. Gener walks the viewer through how the composer strives to make listeners face their own fears and conscience.

Filming Locations: London, Barcelona

Gener explains why he feels Verdi's other operas would never have existed if Nabucco had never come to be. Gener travels to Valencia, where Nabucco is performed at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia. he speaks about one of the central themes in Verdi's career—parent-child relationships.

Filming Locations: Valencia

Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, is a comedy of errors that reflects on the passage of time. Set in eighteenth century imperial Vienna, it tells the story of the romance between an aristocratic woman at the gates of later life and a handsome boy of seventeen. Gener interviews psychologist Patricia Ramírez Loeffler, to discuss the passage of time and how it affects us, about our fear of aging, about couples with a significant age difference—but also about giving up and accepting.

Filming Locations: Vienna

Gener goes to a Spanish school to interview seven-year olds and their parents about their reception to the opera. Later, he interviews a neuroscientist and a musicologist to understand more about Mozart's music.

Filming Locations: Tudela de Duero

Gener explains the three reasons why opera came to Venice in the middle of the 17th century and became a true phenomenon for the masses.

Then Gener heads to the Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza, the first enclosed theatre in the world, to understand what theatres were like before opera became a fashionable spectacle, and to see how theatres alla italiana were born and proliferated in Venice.

Filming Locations: Venice

Lulu is about our most basic instincts, starring an enigmatic, dangerous and spellbinding woman—with sex, death, and psychoanalysis as the main ingredients for the story.

Filming Locations: Vienna

Madama Butterfly teaches us about hope, longing, unconditional love, and the problems when two cultures collide. Gener visits a cherry tree plantation in full bloom to learn about the symbolism of this tree in Japanese culture, and in Madama Butterfly specifically.

Filming Locations: Barcelona

Written in the early 20th century by Antonin Dvorák, Rusalka is based on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Little Mermaid. The heart of the story is accepting one’s own identity—but it also explores the mystery of the fragility of love.

Will giving up on being who we are bring us happiness or misery? Is "Rusalka" a metaphor for racism? Or is it simply an exaltation of difference?

Filming Locations: Banyoles

Gener retells the origin of opera and compares it to a metaphoric pregnancy. He guides explaining a double journey: the life journey of a future baby and Opera's "journey" to Florence and Mantua, through the history of music, of its evolution and gestation, until it gives birth to a genre.

Filming Locations: Florence, Mantua