Opera :
Verdi - Don Carlo

Grand opera in five acts
Music by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Libretto by Camille Du Locle and Joseph Méry, based on the tragic poem Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien (1787) from Friedrich von Schiller
Premiere : Académie impériale de musique, Paris, 11 march 1867
Premiere 2nd revised version, in Italian and in four acts: Teatro alla Scala, Milan, 10 january 1884

New production

For foreign composers seeking fame, 19th century Paris was a veritable magnet. Since the fall of the House of Orléans, however, the bourgeois class had triumphed and its taste turned toward a genre of opera with rigid conventions and an obligatory ballet included, a form established by Giacomo Meyerbeer. In 1867 Giuseppe Verdi, disappointed by his previous experiences in Paris, defiantly thrust himself into composing Don Carlos. The result was a grand and powerful fresco with strong, profound characters. One of his most splendid compositions, this opera turns into music a weighty text where the battles between religious and political power, love and duty, friendship and reason of state, are described with remarkable accuracy. In order to preserve the dramatic tension, Verdi later condensed his work into 4 acts (in Italian) for La Scala. It is in this form and with a magnificent cast that we shall see this work in Monte Carlo in a new production by one of today’s great stage directors, Davide Livermore.