Nothing’s Fair in Love and War

Il Trovatore is unique, even among the works of its own composer and its own country. It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigor, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homogeneous in atmosphere and feeling.

The basic theme of Il Trovatore is love, crossed by adverse fate, leading to death. Love that has been elevated to the status of main support of human existence, while fate's hostility implies a world where comforting belief in a benevolent Providence watching over man has been lost. This formula is expressed in terms of dramatic conflicts in which the love-ideal is incarnated in the hero and heroine – Manrico and Leonora – while malignant fate hovers behind their adversaries.

What attracted Verdi to this story was an accumulation of aberrant situations. Caught in their fixed attitudes, the characters are not, nor are they meant to be, true to life. They are emotionally charged symbols of life's ironies: Manrico of the inability of a man to know himself; Count di Luna of the destructiveness of human passion; Leonora of the futility of self-sacrifice. But the central character – Verdi insisted she had to be – is Azucena. “This woman's two great passions,” he wrote to his librettist Cammarano, “her love for Manrico and her wild thirst to avenge her mother, must be sustained to the end.”

A colorful, lively violence dominates this opera, and the unbroken series of theatrical effects which succeed each other on the stage make Il Trovatore the romantic opera par excellence.

Renay Conlin, General & Artistic Director