Giovanni Paisiello | L'Ulisse errante

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Rigoletto in Mantua | Palazzo Te, the pleasure palace

What is Rigoletto it about? This sounds like a simple question, which could be answered by telling the story of the Duke of Mantua, the city of Mantua, his hunchback jester and the jester’s daughter, Gilda. A story of love, deception, revenge, and death. The story, of course, is so close to the one told by playwright and poet Victor Hugo in his play Le Roi s’amuse (The King has fun), that they could appear the same thing. But anyone who loves opera will not be satisfied by this explanation. In the best operas, music is much more than an accompaniment to the story: it is through the power of music that the story unfolds into the drama. Verdi fell literally in love with Hugo’s play and was determined to translate it into music; despite his librettist Francesco Maria Piave‘s concerns, particularly over the fourth act culminating in the deposition of a dying Gilda in a bag. In a letter dated June 1850, Verdi explains the reasons he suggested as a title for the opera Monterone’s curse or, by the short, The Curse. “The subject is the curse as a moral element: A distraught father who mourns the honor taken away from his daughter, a […]

March

Where Vincenzo Bellini meets the Coldplay | Palazzo Biscari in Sicily

If a great composer such as Vincenzo Bellini was born in Sicily it’s also thanks to another great personality of his time, the Prince of Biscari Ignatiu Paternò Castello.

March

Naples | City of music and magic

The Teatro San Carlo, certainly one of the finest and biggest in Europe was opened in 1737. Two years later, in 1739 French politician and writer Charles de Brosses referred to Naples as “the world capital of music”.

January

Siracusa | Rossini’s Tancredi

In Stendhal’s opinion Tancredi was Rossini’s best opera. In his biography he wrote: “there’s no bravery or grandeur in this opera but only the simple purity and virginity of genius”. The libretto by Gaetano Rossi was drawn from Voltaire’s tragedy Tancrede. For that libretto Rossini composed an innovative score, combining in an original way the baroque “extreme coloraturas” with the pre-Romantic simple melodies of the new belcanto.