11/8/2022 0 Comments Rigoletto sf opera![]() La Fenice's poster for the world premiere of Rigoletto Despite their best efforts, including frantic correspondence with La Fenice, the Austrian censor De Gorzkowski emphatically denied consent to the production of "La Maledizione" (its working title) in a December 1850 letter, calling the opera "a repugnant immorality and obscene triviality." In August, Verdi and Piave retired to Busseto, Verdi's hometown, to prepare a defensive scheme as they continued work on the opera. He was wrong, and rumours began to spread in early summer that the production would be forbidden. As Verdi wrote in a letter to Piave: "Use four legs, run through the town and find me an influential person who can obtain the permission for making Le Roi s'amuse." Guglielmo Brenna, secretary of La Fenice, promised the duo that they would not have problems with the censors. ![]() The play had been banned in France following its premiere nearly twenty years earlier (not to be staged again until 1882) now it was to come before the Austrian Board of Censors (as Austria at that time directly controlled much of Northern Italy.)įrom the beginning, both composer and librettist knew this step would not be easy. Verdi later explained that "The subject is grand, immense, and there is a character that is one of the greatest creations that the theatre can boast of, in any country and in all history." However, Hugo's depiction of a venal, cynical, womanizing king ( Francis I of France) was considered unacceptably scandalous. That came in the form of Victor Hugo's controversial five-act play Le roi s'amuse ("The king amuses himself"). He initially asked Francesco Maria Piave (with whom he had already created Ernani, I due Foscari, Macbeth, Il corsaro and Stiffelio) to examine the play Kean by Alexandre Dumas, père, but soon came to believe that they needed to find a more energetic subject. He was prominent enough by this time to enjoy some freedom in choosing texts to set to music. ![]() A walk of less than thirty minutes can take you from the Teatro Real, through the austere beauty of the early-seventeenth-century Plaza Mayor, to the neoclassical domain of the Prado, nearby El Retiro Park and the Reina Sofía, housed in a former eighteenth-century hospital.La Fenice of Venice commissioned Verdi in 1850 to compose a new opera. Luisotti’s orbit includes the extraordinary trio of museums, the Prado, Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza, encompassing the contrasting historical and architectural styles of the capital city, from the Hapsburg dynasty of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the succeeding Bourbon monarchs. Luisotti enjoys walking through the city’s grand boulevards, plazas and parks. Though Madrid is a great European metropolis-“a city with an open mind” he says-its “centro” is relatively compact. During the Rigoletto run, he and his wife, Rita, occupied an apartment with views of the terraced, neoclassical Sabatini Gardens, adjacent to the Royal Palace, which-like the opera house-is located at the Plaza de Oriente. ![]() Still, for him, Madrid is far more than a place to work. Though Luisotti occasionally goes out after a performance, he prefers a quiet evening with his wife or friends. Madrileños keep famously late hours at such legendary haunts as Bar Cock, a nexus for intellectuals, artists, bullfighters and royalty since the 1920s (Luis Buñuel, Ernest Hemingway, Ava Gardner, Pedro Almodóvar), or the recent Only You Hotel, with its bar-cum-lounge featuring more than thirty types of gin. " N ICOLA LUISOTTI, MUSIC DIRECTOR of San Francisco Opera, has just completed a January run of Rigoletto at Madrid’s Teatro Real at the time of our interview. The Italian-born maestro loves to work and relax in the SPANISH CAPITAL.įeatured in the April 2016 issue of Opera News: ![]()
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