VERDI’S 200TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION: “Il Trovatore” at the Czech State Opera House

The Czech State Opera Presents

trovatoreCzehIl trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi

November 6, 2013

December 29, 2013

February 20, 2014

March 18, 2014

stage director Lubor Cukr

Libretto: Salvatore Cammarano
Conductor: Jan Latham-Koenig, Jiří Štrunc, Richard Hein
Stage director: Lubor Cukr
Sets: Josef Jelínek
Costumes: Josef Jelínek
Chorus master: Tvrtko Karlovič, Adolf Melichar

State Opera Orchestra

State Opera Chorus

Premiere: May 26, 2011

The romantic story set in 15th-century Spain about the troubadour Manrico and the Gypsy Azucena, replete with heroism, machinations, love, hatred and revenge, is rather intricate and its plot improbable to say the least. The celebrated tenor Leo Slezak, a favourite guest of the New German Theatre (today’s State Opera) and a superlative performer of Manrico, remarked: “I have sung the Troubadour at least a hundred times, and I still haven’t the slightest inkling as to what this opera is actually about!” Nevertheless, Giuseppe Verdi superbly negotiated all the unlikely plot twists and duly created one of his most forcible works. The melodies in Il trovatore are lavishly expressive and the celebrated Anvil Chorus “Vedi le fosche notturne” from Act 2 has experienced numerous paraphrases, including Glen Miller’s jazz arrangement. The premiere on 19 January 1853 at the Teatro Apollo in Rome was a triumph and opera stages were soon scrambling to stage the work. Alongside La traviata and Rigoletto, Il trovatore is the apex of Verdi’s creation, and the three operas are still record-breakers when it comes to the number of performances and visitors at opera houses around the world.

The opera is staged in Italian original version and Czech and English surtitles are used in the performance.

Duration of the performance: 2 hours and 30 minutes, 1 intermission

Earl Luna

Leonora

Azucena

Manrico

This entry was posted in Music, OPera and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.