Un Ballo in maschera - Royal Opera House Covent Garden (2014-2015) - Un Ballo in maschera - Royal Opera House Covent Garden (2014-2015)

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General Information

Description

New production, co-production with Theater Dortmund

Giuseppe Verdi set aside his project of adapting King Lear – never to be completed – to create the opera that would eventually become Un ballo in maschera. He selected a pre-existing libretto by Eugène Scribe (originally created for French composer Daniel Auber) on the story of the reformist Swedish king Gustav III, who was assassinated at a masked ball in 1792. The subject was not at all to the taste of the notoriously prickly censors in Naples, who in addition to wanting the setting and period changed demanded that the murder take place offstage. Verdi angrily refused, and sought another theatre to stage the work. The considerably more liberal Teatro Apollo in Rome still insisted a fictional setting be used; Verdi had little choice but to relent, and transformed King Gustav into Riccardo, governor of Boston. The opera was first performed on 17 February 1859 and was an immediate success.

Verdi's music for Un ballo in maschera is some of his most sophisticated and subtle, marrying the opulence of French grand opera (a style he had refined in Les Vêpres siciliennes and Don Carlos) with innovative developments in Italian opera. German director Katharina Thoma (Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne) makes her Royal Opera debut with this new production.

More information is available on the operahouse's official website.

Schedule

December 18, 2014 19:30:00

December 22, 2014 19:30:00

December 30, 2014 19:30:00

January 02, 2015 19:30:00

January 06, 2015 19:30:00

January 13, 2015 19:30:00

January 17, 2015 19:00:00

Casting

Katharina Thoma

Daniel Oren

Joseph Calleja

Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Anatoli Sivko

James Platt

Jihoon Kim

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Sakker

Liudmyla Monastyrska

Marianne Cornetti

Rosemary Joshua

Work's characters list

Director

Conductor

Riccardo

Renato

Samuele

Tom

Tom

Silvano

Un Giudice

Amelia

Ulrica Arvidson

Oscar

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