Our season opens with a very grown-up Verdi, a political Verdi, the Verdi of Don Carlos. Led by conductor Marc Minkowski, we continue our exploration of the continent of French Grand Opera after Les Huguenots (2020) and La Juive (2022), even if Verdi’s last Parisian work was especially successful in its Italian version, itself largely translated from the French one. In 1867, Giuseppe Verdi was at the height of his career; he already had more than twenty operas under his belt and reluctantly accepted this new commission from the Paris Opera. After a very difficult period of composition, during which the piece did not really reach its final maturity, il maestro left us the choice of multiple versions of his magnum opus. Friedrich Schiller’s play Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien, created 80 years earlier, served as the framework for the composer and his successive librettists. Land of honour and hubris, the Spain of Philip II, dominated by the omnipresent Inquisition, is the backdrop for the characters sprung from Schiller’s aesthetic ideal of Sturm und Drang. Between emotion and ideology, Verdi employs these characters to expose the backstage of power and denounce religious fanaticism, but also to present their contradictions, if not their actions, as more human.
Director Lydia Steier, who brought us Les Indes galantes in 2019, comes back to Geneva with a grandiose portrayal of absolutism and the culture of secrecy. In a dystopian society where every move is recorded and reported and can be used against anyone at any time, the characters survive in shades of yellow. Distanced from truth and idealism, they are creatures of fear in a dark and claustrophobic universe where even King Philip II, played by the Russian bass Dimitry Ulyanov, (who we see again after War and Peace, La Juive and Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District) is apparently not the only one to hold power. The Marquis de Posa, sung by the renowned French baritone Stéphane Degout, turns into a dangerous politician whose opportunism has devoured any trace of optimism, as does the scheming Princess Eboli – Swiss mezzo Ève-Maud Hubeaux, a rising star of the opera skies. The unhappy couple Don Carlos/Élisabeth de Valois, doomed to a tragic fate, is sung by two US artists, Charles Castronovo and Rachel Willis-Sørensen.
