On his military campaign abroad, an eccentric king is more concerned with conquering women than land. He always gets his way, until one day he falls for his brother’s secret lover. Xerxes’ tactics, which he changes as often as his opulent costumes, allow his opponents little time to rest. This results in a ‘baroque Muppet Show,’ as the celebrated Norwegian director Stefan Herheim describes his spectacular stage production. After a bewildering series of games of love and intrigue, Handel’s opera ends with the insight that life is a theatre in which one cannot always choose one’s own role.

The premiere of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd in Madrid is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the Teatro Real's bicentennial celebrations. Its magnificent libretto, based on the novel of the same name by Herman Melville, tells the story of the sailor Billy Budd: a handsome, loyal, generous, strong, naive, and kind young man whose beauty and personality drive the ship's master-at-arms mad. Unable to control the situation, the master crucifies the naive young man without mercy. This new production by the Teatro Real is being presented for the first time in Madrid, in co-production with the Opéra national de Paris, under the direction of Deborah Warner, one of the great names in stage direction today.

Katerina Ismailova is wealthily married and lonely, her husband impotent and her father-in-law a tyrant. She is trapped in a world where merciless brutality, despotism and cruelty reign. The woman with a lust for life and love gives way to her raw longing for freedom when a new labourer Sergei starts working for the Ismailov family. She throws herself into a passionate affair with him and poisons her father-in-law's food. But the increasing radicalism of her desire for self-determination will claim further victims...