The former artistic director of the Liceu Christina Scheppelmann, who was entrusted with the programming of the Barcelona lyrical coliseum between 2014 and 2019, at a time when the institution was going through a severe economic crisis, has been named ‘intendant’ of the most disruptive opera house in Europe and, therefore, the world: La Monnaie in Brussels. The German director, who is currently responsible for the Seattle Opera, will replace the playwright Peter de Caluwe, whose contract ends in July 2025.
De Caluwe has spent two decades building a program attentive to the staging. The combative montages that seek to reflect the current times of change have been a trademark of the house to date. Although it seems that the theater has decided to take a Copernican turn and bet on an artistic direction more akin to the vocal issue and well related to singer agencies.
Christina Scheppelmann (Hamburg, 1965) interrupted her tenure as general director of the recently founded Royal Opera House in Masqat to respond to the call from the Liceu, where she had previously trained as an assistant artistic director. But by then her career had already developed in the artistic direction of the Washington National Opera -from 2002 to 2012- and in San Francisco, from 1994 to 2001.
De Caluwe, for his part, has been a worthy heir to Gerard Mortier in maintaining La Monnaie as a beacon of contemporary creation and with theatrical risk bets. And in this time he has turned this square in Brussels into the only opera house that holds two or three newly created productions per season. Something that no other European coliseum has dared to do.
