Director's Note: Il Trovatore

Il trovatore came into my life when I was seven. My opera-hungry parents took us to the old Met. What I remember was a dark jumble of story pieces and a nondescript set, lit up occasionally by Leontyne Price’s Leonora––indelibly glamorous of voice and person and so eloquent in utterance of music and text––and Franco Corelli’s Manrico, dashing and vocally ear-popping with those unforgettable beast-of-prey high notes. Verdi intended Azucena to be the central character, but the Met didn’t cast anyone in that role to match the Price-Corelli power couple.  

Some angel landed me in Salzburg 18 months later, where Giulietta Simionato showed me what Azucena might be; she gave costars Price and Corelli a run for their money with her reckless intensity and fabulous singing, and Azucena’s story started to emerge from the gloom. Ettore Bastianini’s Count Di Luna in Salzburg, as handsome and stentorian as Corelli’s Manrico, made their political and romantic rivalry vivid. I thought he and Corelli were going to eat each other alive.   

The word on the street had always been, and would continue to be, that Trovatore had a bad plot understandably spoofed by the Marx Brothers; and it needed singers as great as Salzburg’s to really come alive and usually didn’t get them. Nothing could save it from theatrical gloom, not even the brilliant score––a riot of vigor and color, fury and tenderness. I attended performances and listened to different recordings over many years but never for a moment thought of directing it.  

Then, 60 years after those first performances, Khori Dastoor and Patrick Summers ask me to do just that. And for the first time in my life, I look squarely into Trovatore’s eyes and hold its gaze. This is what I see.  

I see two families haunted by emotional and physical trauma––from mistakes made, from violence done, from secrets kept. Scratch any family, and you’ll find all these things. And like any family, these Trovatore people (the Count Di Luna’s family and Azucena’s) have struggled, suffered, found different ways to deal with their losses––some tragic, some transformative, all lonely.   

I also see two plots––one that happens before the opera starts (its origin story) and one that is the opera actually happening. The story of the opera isn’t hard to understand, it’s what happens before the opera that makes Trovatore hard to understand. How to tell, or show, both stories?   

I see that ground zero, long before the opera picks up the story, is essentially a lynching: Azucena’s mother is accused of bewitching the old Count’s child and burned at the stake not an hour later, after being dragged there and beaten all the way––because she has dark skin and is Roma. Ferrando tells some of this tale in Verdi’s first scene, and his language brims with racial hatred; ditto that of his men. I’m shocked to read it unsoftened by the music. How to bring the audience to this horror? It’s what starts the whole entanglement of motive and action in the opera.  

And it’s why Azucena was, always and only, played as a crazed, demented hag, though she’s the only character who holds all the cards. Might she in fact be a strong, sane, sentient woman who knows exactly what she’s doing?  I see the young Count fixed on possessing Leonora. He crashes angrily about, yet also remarks on his own excess––surely, he sees what he’s doing even if he can’t control his behavior.  What suffering compels him to flail toward ownership? Does the traumatic loss of his brother, his only childhood companion, and the longing for him, have something to do with it? Why the desperate need to call someone “mine”? He sings that word as often as any other.   

I begin to feel these people are very familiar and wonder if they might seem more actual in a contemporary setting.  

I see that the opera plays out against the background of a turf war which pits Manrico and the Count against each other politically. It’s based on a civil struggle in 15th-century Spain, in which an aristocrat landowner tries to keep a neighboring army out of his business. In Trovatore’s source play, the meddling army is led by a man brought up to be Roma. The opera isn’t about a civil strife, but it takes place during one.   

I start to wonder how it would play if the turf war was in a modern European city––a white-collar militia, titled and entitled, vs. armed rebels of an oppressed ethnic group. I remember the Basque rebellion that played out over 50-plus years in Spain against the official attempt (during and after Franco) to ban Basque language and culture. There are so many parallels today.  

Contemporary Bilbao, say, or Valencia, or Barcelona––with a sharp clash of architectures old and new, of street culture, of racial tensions and political disagreement––all feel like arresting contexts in which Trovatore’s haunted families might enact their stories clearly, right outside our doors.