Verdi in Parma & Busseto - Rigoletto, I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata and Macbeth in Verdi’s heartland

The Festival Verdi takes place on the stretch of country where the composer was born, schooled, learnt his trade, and, despite youthful resentments, where he bought a farm and built a villa as a haven and retreat for the last 50 years of his life. Lying then within the Duchy of Parma, it remains predominantly rural, with the attraction of a kind of unchanging, authentic ordinariness. This was the mise-en-scène which gave rise to an artistic oeuvre displaying a range of tumultuous passions and human empathy equalled perhaps only by Shakespeare. Happily, it is also an area famous for its food, and a region rich in musical history, with Cremona being the world’s most celebrated centre of violin-making.

The performances are in two theatres which are of the highest historical importance and beauty, and in the church of San Francesco del Prato in the heart of Parma. The Teatro Regio in Parma was built in 1829 by ex-Empress Maria-Luisa, modelled on La Scala in Milan. The small horse-shoe Teatro Verdi at Busseto dates to 1868 and was built within what had been the local magnate’s palazzo.

Performances at Parma’s Teatro Regio are always exciting occasions — the audience is one of the most knowledgeable and vocal (in every sense!) in Italy — and the new production of I Lombardi will surely offer a wonderful opportunity to sample authentic Italian operatic culture. I Lombardi is really the biggest event of this year’s festival, and a rare opportunity to hear and see a Verdi opera that was once very successful (it was the first of his works to reach America) but whose fortunes have faded a little. Yet it contains much exciting music — as only Verdi’s fourth opera, it was composed as a follow-up to the success he had enjoyed with Nabucco and aimed to replicate some of the more famous work’s big moments. Premiered at La Scala in 1843, its plot recounts the escapades of the Lombards at the First Crusade.

Parma’s presentation of the much better-known Macbeth is characteristic of a festival that never stands still. It will be performed in an alternative venue, still one of the city’s landmarks — the Chiesa di San Francesco del Prato, deconsecrated already in the 19th century and turned into a city prison. Restoration work is nearing completion, and it is due to be reconsecrated and handed back to the church, but not before it is used at this year’s festival. The festival’s approach to Macbeth itself will also be novel, building on its programme in recent years of exploring French versions of Verdi operas — we’ll hear the French libretto used in Paris in 1865, when Verdi revised the opera substantially.

Busseto, near the composer’s birthplace, offers a very different experience. Seeing performances in the little Teatro Verdi di Busseto provides one of the most intimate operatic experiences, and will doubtless heighten the tragic impact of that well-known masterpiece that is Rigoletto. The first of the three middle-period ‘hits’ that Verdi enjoyed in the early 1850s (Il trovatore and La traviata followed in quick succession), Rigoletto contains some of the composer’s best-loved music.