Recreating reality is all well and good, says Verdi, "but inventing reality is better, far better." And what a reality is invented: Swapped children, avenged mothers, sacrificed lovers... An almost mythical tale full of incredible twists and turns that repeatedly put the characters in states of emergency. Verdi was concerned with the credibility of the emotions, not the plot. Singing as utopia, as the opening up of a space that does not exist in recreated reality. In his production of Verdi's Troubadour opera, Paul-Georg Dittrich embarks on a search for this moment.
"If one imitates reality, something quite good can come out of it," wrote Giuseppe Verdi to his good friend, the salonnière Clara Maffei, more than 20 years after the premiere of Il trovatore: "But inventing reality is better, far better." It is certainly no injustice to the composer to suggest that this idea is also the central artistic idea of Il trovatore, which was written between Rigoletto and La traviata . Like Rigoletto, Il Trovatore is also a night piece: everything is illuminated by flickering firelight. You can't see well, you can only vaguely recognize. Confusion everywhere. "If you reproduce reality, you get something good, but a photograph, not a painting," Verdi continued. But the composer wants paintings, not photographs. So he divides his opera into tableaux. He was interested in escalation, exaggeration, the incomprehensible, horror - and in the credible depiction of human emotions.
A dramaturgy like a traffic accident: Verdi has the characters shoot towards each other from the furthest corners and in the most impossible constellations, only to then record their emotions with seismographic precision - with music whose beauty marks nothing less than an absolute state of emergency, and whose rhythm leaves no doubt that there is no escape here.
Premiere June 9, 2024
Further performances: June 12, 16 and 23, July 1, 4, 9 and 16, 2024
