After Falla’s death, the characters of El retablo de maese Pedro continued to travel round the world, daring musicians and artists to put on new and ever-surprising productions. Set de-signers and artistic directors have used drawings, projections, shadows and other animation methods that force Don Quixote to transcend its reality. Miquel Barceló presented a ghostly gentleman in a space filled with pigeon droppings, with oversize insects in lieu of puppets; Antonio Saura used non-figurative characters set inside borders that recall the ephemeral structures of Baroque architecture; Javier Mariscal used his drawings to give the Retablo a comic-book aesthetic; and Enrique Lanz proposed a grandiose vision of the work, with an eight-metre-tall Don Quixote moved by towlines, as if unfurling the sails of a monumental show.

It has often been said that, with his Retablo, Falla gave Don Quixote a second lease on immor-tality, and there is certainly truth in this; as María Zambrano once said, the work “is not a present that evokes the past; it is a past that runs ahead to the present”. That same “magical operation” has allowed many artists to reinvent the visual imagery of Don Quixote, using Manuel de Falla’s music as a springboard.