Fire destroyed the Liceu's interior in 1861, just fourteen years after opening. Barcelona rebuilt it, grander than before, and it reopened on 20 April 1862 with an auditorium seating 2,338 -- making it, until 1989, the largest opera house in Europe by capacity. Then, on 7 November 1893, an anarchist threw two bombs into the stalls during a performance of Rossini's William Tell, killing between twenty and thirty people. The theater survived that attack, but not the fire of 31 January 1994, which gutted the auditorium once more. Again, Barcelona rebuilt. The new Liceu reopened on 7 October 1999, its horseshoe-shaped auditorium recreated from the 1861 design but upgraded with modern stage technology, computerized cameras for broadcasting, and a hemispheric ceiling lamp that conceals lighting and sound equipment. Each destruction was treated not as an ending but as an argument for resurrection.

The auditorium is a classic Italian horseshoe, thirty-three meters at its widest, with a main floor and five balconies rising above it. Unlike many opera houses, there are no columns obstructing sightlines except within the platea, so the balconies sweep in an unbroken golden arc. Boxes line the lower levels, their divisions marked by low screens rather than walls -- a design that emphasizes the communal experience of opera-going. The wider, more luxurious proscenium boxes are known as banyeres, or bathtubs. After the 1994 fire destroyed the ornate box decorations that owners had accumulated over a century, the reconstruction restored the gilded plasterwork and polychrome moldings to their 1909 appearance. Eight circular ceiling paintings and three proscenium paintings, lost in the blaze, were recreated by contemporary artist Perejaume.

Verdi's Aida leads the Liceu's all-time performance count with 442 stagings between 1877 and 2008. Rigoletto follows with 359. The top fifteen most-performed works read like a syllabus of nineteenth-century European opera: Gounod's Faust, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Wagner's Lohengrin, Puccini's La boheme, Rossini's Barber of Seville. Wagner held a particular grip on the Liceu's audiences: the theater staged the first performance of Parsifal outside Bayreuth on 31 December 1913, with the Catalan tenor Francesc Vinas in the title role. From the 1880s through the 1950s, Wagner was among the most beloved composers in the house. The theater also premiered dozens of Catalan and Spanish operas, from Felipe Pedrell's grand opera Els Pirineus in 1902 to Joan Guinjoan's Gaudi in 2004, maintaining a commitment to local composition alongside the international repertoire.

The Liceu has always been more than an opera house. The Circulo del Liceo, a private club within the building since 1847, is Spain's oldest club still at its original location, its rooms decorated in Art Nouveau style with paintings by Ramon Casas and works by Santiago Rusinol. During the nineteenth century, rivalry between Liceu devotees and fans of the Teatre Principal, Barcelona's other major theater, generated enough passion to inspire satirical comedies. Narcis Oller set his 1892 novel La febre d'or in the theater's world. Eduardo Mendoza's 1986 novel La ciudad de los prodigios used it as a symbol of Barcelona's ambitions. Since 1994, the theater has been owned by a public foundation representing the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the city and provincial councils of Barcelona -- a recognition that the Liceu belongs to everyone, even as it retains the intimate intensity of a house where, as Saint-Saens noticed, they love tenors too much.