Francisco Coll’s Enemigo del pueblo opens in Madrid on 12 February, following an acclaimed world premiere in Valencia in November 2025. Christian Karlsen, replacing Francisco Coll due to illness, conducts four performances at the Teatro Real.
Writing about the Spanish-language opera in the New Yorker, Alex Ross described Coll “as a significant new creative force in the opera world”. The 80-minute piece – Coll’s first evening length stage work – adapts Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with a text by Àlex Rigola, who also directed the world premiere production. Enemigo del pueblo was commissioned by Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía and Teatro Real – the first new opera ever commissioned by Valencia and marking their 25th anniversary.
Cast in two acts and lasting around 80 minutes, it tells the story of a local Doctor who discovers corruption and malfeasance in a spa town, with far-reaching personal and political consequences. Baritone José Antonio López sings the Doctor, Marta Fontanals-Simmons his daughter Marta, and tenor Moisés Marín the town Mayor. Soprano Brenda Rae and baritone Isaac Galán play Petra and Mario.
…abrasive and rhapsodic by turns…a gripping evening, largely on the strength of Coll’s stem-winder of a score. The opera begins with a kinetic, frantic prelude…The doctor himself is characterized sometimes by boisterously chattering lines, sometimes by semi-Wagnerian bombast…crowd scenes, however abbreviated, unleash explosive energy. Pummelling orchestral passages hint at the neutral rage of nature itself…a significant new creative force in the opera world.
The New Yorker (Alex Ross) 1 December 2025
Impressive. Breathtaking. Brilliant. The incandescent genius of Coll permeates every moment, note, and word of Enemigo del pueblo, a masterful opera…perhaps the most complete opera to emerge in the 21st century in the realm of Spanish-language music…Coll's talent approaches the operatic sensibility of geniuses like Verdi and Puccini, but also that of Debussy…a landmark event not only in the twenty-year history of the Palau de Les Arts, but also in Spanish music…
Levante (Justo Romero) 6 November 2025
.…highly developed harmonic structure, an extraordinarily rich use of the orchestral and choral colours, and, above all, a profound and highly mature dramatic sense, through which Coll masterfully portrayed the progressive emotional hardening of the characters…
Scherzo (Jesús Castañer) 6 November 2025
The best thing about it all is Coll's extraordinary music…The opera opens with a bullfighting pasodoble in 7/8 time, as clumsy as it is shrill and grotesque…the opera is punctuated from beginning to end by exquisite orchestral interludes, brimming with explosive gestures and syncopated melodies, magnificently orchestrated…
El País (Pablo L. Rodríguez) 6 November 2025
Looking ahead, Coll’s Lilith will receive its North American premiere in March 2026 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Gustavo Gimeno, a longstanding champion of Coll’s music. The 23-minute work, named for Adam’s first wife and conceived as a “ballet without choreography”, showcases music as multifaceted and contradictory as the Biblical and mythic figure herself. The first movement – ‘Contrapunto Erótico’ – is an expressive highly polyphonic adagio, evoking desire and fear at the same time. The second movement describes a torturous labyrinth, turning into a tragic and grotesque waltz. The finale, ‘Euphoria’, imagines Lilith arrives in the modern city and joining a wild orgy, with all swept along by her seductive force.