Arriaga Theater

This guide to the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao follows the short, brilliant life of Juan Crisostomo Arriaga, a Basque composer born in 1806 who was writing music by eleven and dead in Paris before he turned twenty, having never heard a note performed in the theater that would carry his name. It traces the building itself, opened in 1890 and gutted by fire in 1914 during a zarzuela performance, then swallowed again by Bilbao's 1983 floods. Listen for how each disaster reshaped the theater's grand staircase and facade over the decades that followed.