(Milan) Pure emotions will be there this Thursday for the traditional inaugural evening of La Scala in Milan, which opens its season with Don Carlo, a masterful opera by Giuseppe Verdi combining struggles for power and dramas of jealousy.
A highlight of Italian cultural life, the “Prima” (Premiere) of La Scala thus closes its trilogy dedicated to the torments of the quest for power initiated in 2021 with Macbeth by Verdi and continued with Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky in 2022.
At the helm, Riccardo Chailly who sees in Don Carlo the “Verdi bible” and “a grandiose score which is good for the soul”, allowing, for the duration of a show, to “put aside one’s anxieties”.
In the absence of President Sergio Mattarella, Senator Liliana Segre, 93, a Holocaust survivor, will follow the opera from the palco reale, the prestigious “royal box”, alongside Senate President Ignazio La Russa, co-founder of the post-fascist Fratelli d’Italia party.
Timely for the “Prima” at La Scala, UNESCO on Wednesday included Italian lyrical singing in its intangible heritage, a decision hailed by Rome as recognition of a mark of “global excellence”.
“Don Carlo is one of the great works of the world lyric repertoire and at the same time a parable on authoritarian power which describes a lawless and shameless dictator,” comments Dominique Meyer, director of La Scala, to AFP .
This opera, inspired by the eponymous tragedy by Friedrich von Schiller, transports the audience to 16th century Spain, during the period of the Inquisition established by the Catholic Church to hunt down “heretics”.
The work takes up Verdi’s favorite themes such as the conflict between religious power and royal power, the difficult relationship between father and son and the oppression of peoples.
Singer (bass) Michele Pertusi plays Philip II, King of Spain and father of Don Carlo, a complex character who rules an immense empire with an iron fist, but is fragile in his love life.
The king’s relations with Don Carlo soured after his decision to break off his son’s engagement to the French princess Elisabeth de Valois in order to marry her himself.
In the title role, Francesco Meli, considered one of the most eminent tenors in the Verdian repertoire, recognizes that Don Carlo is “difficult” to interpret, because “he changes mood and therefore register constantly”.
“He is not a hero, he is a man of great sensitivity who overreacts to everything, going from euphoria to despair,” he notes.
The famous soprano Anna Netrebko, a regular at the “Prima”, takes on the role of Elisabeth de Valois, mother-in-law of Don Carlo, a role which also requires great vocal refinement.
“Her voice is low, deep, light and luminous at the same time, she has everything,” expressing “her loneliness, her sadness and her big heart,” explains the Russian diva.
The theater stage is dominated by an immense translucent alabaster tower connected to fences, a symbol of the omnipotence of the Church, and the costumes are mostly black, a sign of wealth at the time.
Alabaster, often used to dress the windows of old religious buildings, “always has a smell of incense, a smell of church,” explains the director of Don Carlo, the Spaniard Lluis Pasqual.
“Verdi’s message, to which I feel very close, is very anticlerical: religions are one of the worst things that human beings have invented,” he assures. And “in the end, it’s always the Grand Inquisitor who wins.”
And he does not hesitate to draw a parallel with the war in the Middle East: “every day on television, we see fundamentalists of all religions violently defending their beliefs.”
The opera takes place during the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648), a period of revolt by Dutch Protestants who were fighting for their independence against the Spanish Catholic occupiers.
Verdi created Don Carlos in 1867 for the Paris Opera, a work in French in five acts which received a mixed reception. Reworked in 1884, the opera was more successful and became Don Carlo, specially created for the Scala in Milan, in four acts.
Thirty-five places in Milan, theaters, museums, public spaces, and even prisons, will resonate with the tunes of Don Carlo on Thursday, with projections on the big screen.
