Recreating reality is all well and good, according to Verdi, "but inventing reality is better, far better." And what kind of reality is being invented: swapped children, avenged mothers, sacrificed lovers... An almost mythical tale full of unbelievable twists and turns that the characters repeatedly put into exceptional circumstances. Verdi was concerned with the credibility of the emotions, not that of the plot. Singing as utopia, as the opening of a space that does not exist in the simulated reality. In his production of Verdi's troubadour opera, Paul-Georg Dittrich goes in search of this moment.
“Something really good can come of it if you recreate reality,” wrote Giuseppe Verdi to his good friend, the salonnière Clara Maffei, more than 20 years after the premiere of Trovatore: “But inventing reality is better, far better.” It hurts the composer certainly not wrong if one assumes that this thought is also the central artistic idea of Il trovatore , which was created between Rigoletto and La traviata . Like Rigoletto, so is Il Trovatorea night piece: everything is illuminated by flickering firelight. You can't see well, you only recognize vaguely. Confusion everywhere. "Something good comes out of reproducing reality, but it's a photograph, not a painting," Verdi continued. But the composer wants paintings, not photographs. So he divides his opera into tableaus. He is interested in the escalation, the exaggeration, the incomprehensible, the horror - and in this the credible representation of human emotions. A dramaturgy like a traffic accident: Verdi has the characters shoot at each other from the farthest corners and in the most impossible constellations, in order to then record their emotions seismographically precisely - with music whose beauty marks nothing less than the absolute state of emergency, and whose rhythm leaves no doubt about it leaves, that there is no escape here. Director Paul-Georg Dittrich and his team take up the idea of the tableau, focus on the highlights in Verdi's colportage opera and don't even try to reproduce the fatal story about the twin mortal enemies Manrico and Luna as a realistic narrative. And the debut of audience favorite Attala Ayan as Manrico promises to come quite close to the rule of thumb of the famous tenor Enrico Caruso: “UmTo successfully perform Il trovatore , all you need is the four best singers in the world.” That's all, nothing more.
