Il trovatore

Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il trovatore, one of his most successful works, was inspired by El trovador, the most successful play of the Spanish dramatist Antonio García Gutiérrez. The National Theatre already staged it in 1854, the year following its world premiere. Later, the Hungarian Royal Opera presented it in its year of inauguration, in 1884, at a time when – almost unbelievably – interest in the work had declined in other opera houses. Thanks to Arturo Toscanini’s revivals in 1902, however, the opera regained new strength to be a pillar of international opera repertoire. The wide-ranging melodrama offers an inexhaustible array of bizarre events: persecution, death at the stake, infanticide, jealousy, thirst for revenge, secrets, suicide, execution, fratricide… The heroes of Verdi’s popular opera endure an almost unimaginable earthly hell, created partly by fate but partly by their own desires and lust for vengeance. Following his popular Nabucco production, conductor-director Gergely Kesselyák once again presents another masterpiece of Italian opera that offers ever new interpretations on a more abstract, universal level wherein our souls, condemned to suffer in the depths of the hell we create ourselves, may take on the roles of Manrico, Luna, Leonora, or Azucena.