La Pathétique

About the show

Madrid 2025. Pedro Berriel, a 53-year-old orchestra conductor, is busy recording Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. So focused is he on his work, that he naturally assumes that the Russian composer is watching the rehearsals by his side. But perhaps the real reason for this delirium is that the conductor is in the terminal phase of a terrible disease. His anxiety at completing the artistic work that, in some way, represents his resistance to his own death, combines with the real anxiety caused by the work.

Jon, Pedro’s husband, forces him to follow the medical treatment without giving into despair, even though the aggressive treatment would impede his artistic endeavour. At a time when his condition seems to be improving, and filled with an overwhelming surge of vitality, Pedro decides to accept an invitation from the International Tchaikovsky Competition to conduct La Pathétique in Moscow during the closing ceremony. President Putin will be the official presiding the event. Pedro comes up with an idea: if he can’t finish the recording destined to become his artistic legacy, at least he will try to put on a performance in the presence of the homophobic Russian president that will make his live rendition of La Pathétique go down in history. Even if it is not exactly the history of art.

Writer and director’s note

La Pathétique is inspired freely and remotely by Dying, the novel by Arthur Schnitzler. The work is an alienated journey between reality and fiction. The hilarious delusions of a man who is troubled by the tragedy of his own demise. A comedy with a tragic protagonist who is determined to have the soundtrack of his life’s end be the sublime emotional outburst of Tchaikovsky’s famous symphony.

The letters that the Russian composer wrote to his loved ones in life, and primarily to his patron, serve to shape this imagined Tchaikovsky, alongside whom the dying conductor tries to find meaning in life, death and his artistic activity.

Pedro has a clear vision of how to perform La Pathétique, of the precise sentiment that should illuminate it. He believes he has the key to unveil the secret program used by the composer to structure his last creation -self-proclaimed as biographical- and of which he only said: Let them try to guess it…

Nothing could be further from Pedro’s intention for his Pathétique to be associated with the ridiculous and shameful meaning that is much more common in our language. But sometimes you need more than one life to learn how to die.

Miguel del Arco