Giuseppe Verdi: Don CarloVienna State Opera

Having previously retired to a monastery, the Emperor Charles V has just died. Not far away, his grandson, the Infante Don Carlo, has been in despair since his father, the King Philip II of Spain, married Elisabeth of Valois, the daughter of the King of France, and with whom he is madly in love. On his return from Spanish-occupied Flanders, his friend Rodrigue, Marquis of Posa, manages to convince him to go there too, to defend the oppressed. He also agrees to secretly deliver a message from Don Carlo to the young queen...

“Power as the antithesis of freedom”
After the disappointing reception of the premiere of his Don Carlos in Paris in 1867, Giuseppe Verdi reworked the opera in 1884, producing an Italian-language version known as the “Milan version”, which succeeded in winning over the public. It is this Don Carlo that the subversive Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov gets to grips with here. For him, Verdi’s work “speaks more than any other opera of power as the antithesis of freedom and of all that power provokes: oppression, violence, imprisonment, murder”. Returning to the Vienna State Opera, where his staging of Wagner’s Parsifal met with critical acclaim in 2021, the director of Leto and Petrov’s Flu has chosen to feed his fervent creativity with a Shakespearean drama in which political, religious, moral and personal conflicts are intertwined. Philippe Jordan conducts the powerful score with which Verdi rekindled his musical inspiration, accompanying a first-rate vocal line-up that includes Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian (Elisabeth of Valois) and American tenor Joshua Guerrero (Don Carlo).