VERDI RE LEAR

Giuseppe Distefano

Verdi's The Failed King Lear, reconstructed by Lenz Rifrazioni

“O terra, rigetta dal grembo i defunti!”. It is the opening song that is heard in silence. They are phantasmatic figures, apparitions of the mind of a dream/nightmare, those that vibrate in the dark space of a room inhabited by a wheelchair in the form of a throne, and by two rows of hospital beds with black fur coats on which lie flesh and blood people, but which belong to the realm of the dead. As soon as they are touched by a hand that brings them back to life, one by one they will take on the consistency of characters to say, to be, to recall. They are the “sensitive” actors, marked in mind and body, whose participation restores the psychophysical truth to the different representations of the madness present in the story of “King Lear”. They embody the harshness of royal existence and the drama of Shakespeare, of the sovereign deceived by the flattering daughters to whom he has divided his kingdom by trusting them out of pride, denying instead his only sincere and faithful daughter, Cordelia, whom she finally helped in the madness of wandering and precocious senility due to the glimmer of betrayal. Artists of undisputed directorial and stage quality for their unique work and research, Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri di Lenz Rifrazioni, are the architects of this important and ambitious theatrical-installation operation that undermines any narrative linearity in favor of a visual and auditory immersion “a sound image with atmospheric potential”, which incorporates words, images, bodies, song, and music into a unique dramaturgical work. Two productions in a single production, with the audience passing through two places, with an exchange of rooms between the first and second acts: two paths in the path towards the recomposition of an unfinished work, or that “King Lear” never set to music to which Giuseppe Verdi dedicated himself without completing it and of which only the libretto by Antonio Somma exists containing the corrections by the composer himself. Pititto and Maestri ventured into an “impossible” invention-reconstruction by staging, as part of the 2015 Verdi Festival in Parma and Busseto, “Verdi Re Lear – L'Opera che non c'è” drawing on scattered fragments, virtual presences of other operas where the tragedy of fatherhood and madness lives. Performative writing –which comes alive inside the stage box of transparent grey velars where, enlarged, the real and virtual images of faces “look at us” - thrives on the music of the well-known English electronic composer Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner. This intertwines with the echoes of Verdi's music, creating a sonic density that blends opera arias performed by two sopranos and two baritones on stage, double Lears together, finally, in the presence of Rocco Caccavari (a doctor and former member of parliament for three terms), whose face, marked by suffering, says more than any word. In the passage to the other place of the representation, the pictorial-installative vision of an immobile group arranged around a throne on the background dominates, made evanescent by the transparent velars where, on multiple levels of projections, Lear's images flow, whose voice we hear. On the details of his curled-up body, he lingers the camera almost as if to map the movements and wounds of the soul. The king sums up the story of fathers and sons overwhelmed by madness and blindness, in a lump of betrayed affections. Opening them is the advance of the sensitive actress Barbara Voghera, whose voice and presence, then dragging a rope on a leash, dresses itself in that authentic truth that sees in the fool, in the buffoon, the only one who can afford true words. The other wandering narrator is Cordelia (Valentina Barbarini) wearing a fur coat that she will place on the shoulders of the fool, no longer a rebellious daughter but an expression of grace. Further expanding its investigation, here is to give Shakespeare's Lear, in addition to madness, the unprecedented dimension of mother, which is thus charged with dense dramatic and symbolic refractions of meaning, after having sung “Dopotta ell'era in stumps” by Il Trovatore, the terrible memory of the mother, with words of the King: “Where have I been? Where am I?…”. In this poetic and continuous short circuit between the lines of the opera libretto and those of Shakespeare's text, visual and musical intrusions with powerful references gather. Like the initial electronic notes of Mameli's Italian anthem which cannot be completed, while on the ground, half-naked, the two baritones – double Lear – and Cordelia shake in plastic depositions.

Rossella Menna

Verdi Lenz Re Lear

Even the great masterpieces, those which in fact, over the centuries, continue to name mysteries through the precision of magical forms, are only regurgitations of a great silence, unconscious impulses, interruptions, forgetfulness – miraculous, since truly inexplicable – of the aphasia that characterizes the life of those who spend their lives summoning voids. More often, aphasia wins: abortions far outnumber births. The artist constantly miscarries, and the more he creates, the more he miscarries, since every birth produces a failure, every impulse testifies to an inadequacy, betraying the vertigo that drove him into shape; and it's increasingly difficult: but pain, indeed, is sometimes forgotten, fortunately. And La Sonnambula and La Norma are born in which there are fragments of an Ernani that Bellini never managed to write, for example. And Rigoletto, The Troubadour, Nabucco, The Force of Destiny, from the Seeds of an Unfinished Desire by Giuseppe Verdi, who throughout his life planned to write an opera based on Shakespeare's King Lear, the unsurpassed momentum, his masterpiece. Of the phantom opera –not unfinished, but aborted, precisely – only the libretto by Antonio Somma remains, with the composer's massive corrections. Abortions of operas, of which only librettos exist, are a no-man's land: snubbed by musicologists who are not interested in what is not set to music, completely ignored by theatreologists who are not interested in opera at all. Yet, between the lines of the corrections, in the relationship between playwright and composer, within the workshop of a future abortion, there is enormous potential for meaning: there are the still vibrant traces of an artist's desperate stretch of a line. There is its relationship with the world, before it perfects itself into a slag. And since “nothing is, except what is not”, to quote Shakespeare himself, in the King Lear who is not there is Verdi, who is the King Lear betrayed by the daughters he trusted out of pride, aided instead by his only faithful daughter, exiled; not by thematic overlap, but by desiring investment, since the very encirclement of an absence releases the most sincere presence. Verdi Re Lear is in fact the name of the absent Verdi opera that Lenz Fondazione, a collective founded and directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, active in the field of visual performing arts since 1985, exploring contemporary language at very high levels, presented –significantly– as part of the 2015 Verdi Festival in Parma and Busseto. All in all, it is understandable that only artists can think of approaching the ghosts of another artist, and on the other hand, only the energy of an approximation, the pathos of a distance, the precision and evanescence of a form they desire can evoke a previous encirclement, another desire, precisely. The audience transitions from a first room to a second, living in a single installation, without consequentiality, from the color room to the black and white room or vice versa, from the song uttered by a visible mouth, to the song heard only, suggested as a memory, from logical sequences that speak of power, scepters and betrayals, to overlaps, grafts, shadows. The spectator chases, recognizes, gets lost, intuits, as in a nightmare, that at times it is Lear's, but Verdi's, or instead of Cordelia, or ours, or it is no longer clear who, who does not begin and does not end, swallows and returns obsessions, insistence, fears, abandonments, tenderness, torment, fragments of words that often, especially if the fool is speaking–Barbara Voghera, now a historic extraordinary “sensitive” actress from Lenz – only the vowel structure remains, the stammering, in the effort of pronouncing, of regaining strength a corporeality, a visceral sense in words whose meaning says only stories. In one of the rooms, in a double projection, on two screens that overlap in depth, a naked man crouching on the ground, Lear, literally pitys what happens on stage, between the two screens; the removal of the royal scepter pronounced by two singers wounds him, just as we see him madly pouring black liquid on his head, black as the black hair of a young and still sovereign king, black as his down, making black fur that tries to dress everything, to regain lost power. The farewell song of an exiled Cordelia “a pilgrim and an orphan”, as in the air of the Force of Destiny, causes her belly to contract, her voice seems to dig like a tube into his body, the eye of the camera, whose action seems to be directly controlled by the heights and volutes of the voice, digs deep into the pores of the skin; and again, we do not understand whether it is the song that shakes the body, as an accusation, or the body, in the very act of moving, that produces sound with the movement, the oscillation, regurgitating the song, as a remorse that comes from the bowels; we see and hear, indistinctly, we understand by synesthesia, since we are understood. Synthesis, indiscretion, mass, evanescence, contradiction and clarity, vastness and precision: truly as in a dream, but with the linguistic rigor through which theatre can summon ghosts. Precisely on the squaring of form, insisting on a practice of theoretical reflection that over the years has become customary for the company, Lenz dedicated a conference entitled Theatres of Sound, coordinated by Enrico Pitozzi, Professor at the University of Bologna, and curated by Valeria Borelli with guests Helga Finter of the University of Giessen and Massimo Marino, professor and theatre critic. An extremely precious and rare opportunity to summarize, synthesize, and condense into a multi-voiced discourse already quite structured reflections, from a scientific point of view, on the dramaturgical potential of sound in contemporary theater; but more precisely on the shift, on the epistemological fracture that has arisen with respect to the very status of what is recognized as theater, theatricality, with the gap triggered by performativity, from overcoming the instance of representation in favor of an instance of self-referentiality; an overcoming that in the voice –as a sound that refers to itself before a meaning –, in the dimension of the vowel as a body,life that pulsates before and between the meshes of verbal meaning, has found an exceptional viaticum. Verdi Re Lear offers, evidently, the perfect opportunity to try to clarify the point. Lenz explores the hiatus between desire and fulfillment which does not occur (and which by statute must not occur), moving between sighs, in the occurrence of the experience before it exposes itself to judgment and dies, evoking the sensitive excrescences of the artist's inconsolability, the masterpieces, the arias and duets from Nabucco, Rigoletto, La forza del destino, Luisa Miller (but not only), works – traced by Carla Delfrate, to whom Pititto and Maestri entrusted the musical research –in which some elements of that original desire are scattered. A real Verdi is grafted into a powerful Verdi, according to a singular process of subtraction: the real opera is depleted of music to give a body to a non-existent opera: removing an object just as it is being named, to produce desiring emptiness, unheimlich, perturbance. More specifically, the sound dimension of the installation develops along a double path. On the one hand, Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, one of the most important composers on the global electronic scene, imprints color on the scenes (and precisely in terms of color, he confesses to having engaged in dialogue with Pititto during the creation phase), almost assuming diegetic responsibility, continually suggesting to the viewer the intertwining of atmospheres, danger, occurrence, desperation; somehow recovering the opera's lyrical vocation, the asemantic, moving potential of melodrama. On the other hand, the Verdi fragments sung by the students of the Arrigo Boito Conservatory of Parma (with the consultancy of Donatella Saccardi) – which instead seem no longer to suggest the atmospheres of the scene but to protrude from within like mad splinters –, deprived of the music, lose precisely that asemantic potential in its original quality, to acquire a new one, through a different strategy. The melody that a cappella singing preserves, in fact, also drawing on the archaeology in the viewer's mind, on the memory of those arias and duets hinted at, suggests a complete lack; it is the silence where a noise is expected that conveys meaning and emotion, that frustrates perception, that plays; Federica Maestri speaks more precisely of «the weight of an absence of a specific music». To recap: while Skanner's sound drawing makes it clear to us that we are inside a dream/nightmare, the wrecks of Verdi's works force us to experience the same desiring emptiness of an aborted composition. And one really cannot imagine a more precise form to evoke impossibility, the boundless desert of life in which Lear, Verdi, Lenz and we inhabit.

Daniele Rizzo

Verdi Re Lear. Festival Verdi

It is a (questionable) now canonically accepted convention that marked the beginning of the history of Italy in the Risorgimento of the second half of the 19th century with the ideologies of homeland and nation, the movements of peoples and ideas, the circulations of goods and undisputed people who were protagonists of the discourses of historians, intellectuals and politicians. Giuseppe Verdi necessarily joined the Fathers' Club, one of the greatest composers of all time, an internationally renowned master of technique and executive elegance, as well as the embodiment –not coincidentally on a par with Alessandro Manzoni– of the Spirit of a nation, whose cultural and social identity immediately became so problematic as with that unnatural obviousness which, like all impositions from above, she was the daughter of political necessities aimed inconsistently and/or paternalistically at the common good, being in reality an expression of the historical bloc now dominant (the bourgeoisie). With a dramatic reversal of priorities (first Italy, then Italians), Unification was, especially at the popular level, experienced as a domination by those who thought that, «Italy made, Italians made» it was a sort of secular (Mazzini), economic (Cavour) or religious (Manzoni) mission, thus building the historical primacy of essence over existence, of having to be over being authentically. By revealing –through art– the complex relationship between normality and diversity, between culture and power, between norm and revolution, that antinomy is destructured in the wake of Lenz's analyses of the origins of our culture, whose conformism (real and dramaturgical) has reduced to soliloquy an entire world of Shakespearean fools deemed non-functional to the mechanisms and devices of production and homologation. Escaping any extremist temptation and compensating for a fantastic balance between aesthetic and existential analytical research, that achieved by Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri is a complete formalism. Bold in pushing himself further, conscious in establishing his own dramatic direction and always admirable in restoring masterpieces of national-popular culture in renewed and perfectly fitting guises, we have admired him from I Promessi Sposi to Adelchi, up to Il Furioso (after Ludovico Ariosto), differently modulated examples of a poetics capable of displaying absolute heights in terms of experience and quality of acting, direction and stage. From these archaeological (cultural and theatrical) premises, but with an unprecedented privilege granted to aesthetic rendering, Verdi Re Lear – L'Opera che non c'è takes shape, an ambitious project aimed at the realization of what remained unfinished, therefore non-existent and impossible to definitively put before the eyes: Giuseppe Verdi's opera «never set to music and of which only Antonio Somma's libretto exists, containing corrections by the composer himself». The itinerant dimension – which, for example, in I Promessi Sposi constituted the immersive declination through which to give body to the audience's responsibility – is broken without being interrupted, also made unfinished because it is entrusted to the centrality of the viewing perspective and confined to the moment of change of room between the first and second acts, whose purely random diachronic succession (by drawing lots) a priori undermines every expectation and narrative plot. Two installations within the setup, therefore, which, grandiose in intention and titanic in execution, saw the splendid collaboration of the Conservatory of Music A. Boito di Parma with musical consultancy by Carla Delfrate, the singing of Donatella Saccardi, and the participation of excellent opera singers. The two groups of spectators are welcomed by different casts and sets. The first – despite the diversity between acts – are wandering inhabitants of a world to which they are marked to stage «the materiality of bodies which, in dialogue with the immateriality of the image, generates a dream-image», realistic fragments of the asymptotic relationship between freedom and duty, between reason and madness, between the shipwreck of the ego and the drift of feelings, or of that tragedy of excess and surplus which was the King Lear of the Bard. The second, both placed beyond «transparent velars» on which – depending on the room – bodies and faces will be seen acting in projection, are striking for the diversity and effectiveness of the visual impact, but, perhaps and even more so given the mixture of sensibilities on stage, for the common ability to contribute to the construction of a typical poor operatic dress,sharing this merit with the sonic density of Scanner's Verdi reinterpretations, astonishing for how they literally manage to dress faces and interpretations of different character and dramatic tones. A representation, then, «impassive and divides, splits, without breaking, without acting, nor suffering» (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense), which, despite a different impression of homogeneity, from the astonishing geometries and chorality of the East Hall to the at times waning plastic intensity of the Mayakovsky Hall, is placed in sublime coherence with the project of Lenz Fondazione, fully testifying to the strength, the urgency and potential of art as an expressive tool and non-coercive context in which to let everyone truly affirm «becomes who you are».

Andrea Alfieri

Verdi reloaded. King Lear according to Lenz Refractions

Shakespeare's greatest dramatic fresco: a mythical Britain in which an old king cannot distinguish between the false and genuine love of his three daughters, and the same ruler dying of grief. It is these scenes so powerful that they must have convinced Giuseppe Verdi to try to set King Lear to music. An attempt that remained unfinished, and the ghost of the British king will continue to hover restlessly in several of the Master's works. Lenz Rifrazioni recalls this ghost of the work by tracing the specters of Verdi's creative desire. It does this by testing the contemporary languages of dramaturgy, real and virtual scenography, music, and the performing body, pushing research into new configurations of intertwining with melodrama. Included as a co-production on the program of the 2015 Verdi Festival in Parma, Lenz's King Lear is a disconcerting encounter between the boundary poetics of the Parma ensemble's performance art and the incorruptible lyrical tradition of the Teatro Regio. The result is a semiotic contamination between the pursuit of sonic-visual experimentation, and the obsessive recurrences that Verdi spread in numerous of his arias in homage to Shakespeare's work. It is an outcome that transitions into a double stage installation, set up in two distinct rooms, where the performance is replicated simultaneously, and the spectators randomly move from one place to another.There is no narrative consequentiality, it is the audience that moves from one immersive mode to another. The two paintings live on their own lives, independent but in symbiosis, a coexisting duplicity to which the viewer is called to testify, to vary their perspective in a fluctuating accumulation of signs. Both scenes are collected in an envelope of transparent drapes, layered on multiple levels, they are the habitat of visual materials diluted in the fragmentation of action. They are videos that simultaneously evoke an absence, a king born but never conceived, suspended faces belonging to blurred territories, imagined but never decrypted. Indefinite as in a dream, but concretely obsessive in their inspection of the memories of a humanity. It is a multivisive game that leads to the reversal of the dynamics of vision, it is the scene that looks at the audience. The two installations are distinguished by a color combination opposite to black and white, and by a monumental simulacrum setting opposite a square hospital room, where two rows of beds house the performers' bodies wrapped in heavy black blankets. While the uniqueness of the performance is manifested in the magnetic echoes of sounds, voices and sighs, and in a psalmodizing liturgy that the actors sprinkle into the meshes of a dramaturgy that can be glimpsed (of the rest of the opera, however, the libretto by Antonio Somma has survived, with the composer's ever-evolving corrections). Actors who, like priests, release a pulsating rite of sound matter, appearing and disintegrating in a ceremony that creates literary flashes. The historic interpreters and sensitive actors of Lenz are intertwined with opera singers, students of the Arrigo Boito Conservatory of Parma, who graft on the omens of an absent score but outlined by the powerful Verdi spirit that blows over the staging.

As powerful as the imprint of the sound elaborations of the cult sound artist Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, already a valuable collaborator on several occasions of the company. The English artist blends a context of Verdi's electronic-experimental reinterpretations that expands the accompanying function, coating the operatic format with a network of sound imaginations, fueled by the Parma composer's complete arias, but which redesign the musical colors, exploring the prisms of a true acoustic dramaturgy. Music as the nervous system of the performing organism. The staging grants nothing to descriptive linearity, proceeding mainly through the connection of paintings, movements fragmented in a circularity of visionary symbols, in which the audience is ideally interned and left helpless in the attempt to extend visual-auditory perception.

The intention is certainly not to provide an even intuited reconstruction of a work that was never composed, and is therefore absent, but rather the fetus's new elaboration of a latent and fugitive creative process. A more frequent combination of this type of project and the all-too-embalmed world of opera would not be without interesting results.

Matteo Brighenti

Verdi and Lenz Fondazione: The Theatre of Voices of “King Lear”

There is a Verdi who is not on the operatic staff. It is King Lear from that William Shakespeare who allowed Roncole di Busseto's swan to prove itself great beyond the spirit of its time, patriotism, the revolutionary movements of ‘48, Italy and the Italians to be made. There is a libretto, while the music is “the ghost of an opera”, as Mario Lavagetto says, that haunts and informs us of itself, like a desire or perhaps a restlessness, Nabucco, Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Trovatore, La forza del destino. Here, in this ‘haunted house’, where the sheets are curtains, the chains are musical notes, and the will always takes the measurements of some stage, Francesco Pititto and Maria Federica Maestri, namely Lenz Fondazione di Parma, entered and together with the electronic music composer Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner and the singers of the Conservatory “Arrigo Boito” they found, discovered by searching, or more precisely they have reached the goal of the Green King Lear. Following the Premise at the last edition of the Natura Dèi Teatri International Festival, the ambitious musical theatre project was proposed in its final form as part of the 2015 Verdi Festival. A company that could only have been born, grown, and realized with Lenz, strengthened by its experience in freeing up all beauty opportunities closed in lack and absence, as demonstrated by its work with ‘sensitive’ actors – with mental and intellectual disabilities – and its long-standing collaboration with the Integrated Care Department of Mental Health and Pathological Addictions of the Parma Local Health Authority.

The tragedy of fatherhood in the intimate of the king/father/madman, outlined by Salvadore Cammarano, former author of Il Trovatore, and completed by Antonio Somma, librettist of Un ballo in maschera, is divided into the rooms of the post-industrial space of Lenz Teatro, the Mayakóvskij Hall and the East Hall:act and repeat, simultaneously, the beginning, development and end, the division of the kingdom, the exile of Cordelia, the Earl of Gloucester and his children, the madness and death of Lear. The audience in one room, at the end of the performance, moves to the other: the lack of narrative linearity reflects the impossibility of reconstructing a work that was never composed, except by interpreting it, inventing it through changes in mental (and physical) postures, places, and gazes, the same ones that are also asked of the audience, here an author more than ever. The virtual and real of the stage, rendered by the dramaturgy, imagoturgy, and direction of Francesco Pititto and the installations and costumes of Maria Federica Maestri, are the multiple linguistic and expressive fragments to which the spectator is called to shape Verdi's incessant creative research. The music is that of Scanner, the arias and duets selected by M° Carla Delfrate, according to a grid of affinities and references to the father-son relationship and to the themes of deception, power, old age, incommunicability, are a cappella, because of Lear only the words remain, it is a landscape of which only the map exists, a territory that we will never be able to find, even knowing where to go looking for him.

Mayakóvsky Hall < Three gray, transparent screens, one behind the other, and at the back the throne covered in black, furry cloaks, are the wild clearing between dream and augmented reality, between action and imagination, in which Lear asks his three daughters who loves him most. The King is a voice (by Rocco Caccavari) that falls from above and the image of a world-body, naked, that has nothing left, that has lost the weight of everything. This projection becomes door and window, the hedge beyond which to look at Cordelia's song of inexorable fate “a pilgrim and orphan” as in The Force of Destiny. Still and still, the singers' voices prepared by Prof. Donatella Saccardi vibrate the notes in the air until the last, final farewell. Magnetic, almost magical, assonances guide an overlapping of concentric listening and comparison planes like circles in water. Light and lament, fearful sensuality and the gaze towards those who are no longer there. The loneliness is inflicted on Lear and the umbilical cord is a noose tied around the neck of the Fool played by the ‘sensitive’ actress Barbara Voghera: what is in the head does not come out except at the cost of pain.

East Room < A theory of 10 hospital beds, 5 on each side, covered with the usual black and hairy coats, a transparent grey screen closing the scene and a smaller one at the back, are the labyrinth of infirmity, limbo, the storm of the senses returning from the old king's internal war. The drama's genesis is retraced, along with Lear's trial of his daughters Nerilla and Regana, and the meeting, not present in the original libretto, with Gloucester on the moor, united by royal blindness and paternal blindness. Verdi's lyrics and Scanner's live electronics meet a frenetic, race-against-time, apocalyptic, hopeless rhythm. The last man on Earth, Lear sits on his throne, a pram. Roberto Caccavari, honorary president of the Lenz Foundation, has a chiaroscuro beard that appears to be carved into the ice and wind. His presence approaches, overlaps, and almost enters his image projected on the screen. The face, taken in detail, appears to be furrowed by the craters of the Moon, the real mouth in the filmed mouth, which opens wide and breaks the breath with light like the lighthouse does with the waves in the night. He stands there, his daughters or their ghosts beside him, and throws his eyes over the livid curtain: we come into the world and cry, “all fools”, all crazy. Human disease is a cosmic tragedy on shores suffering from remorse.

Alessandro Trentadue

Verdi Re Lear of Lenz, a handbook for spectators

Verdi Re Lear is an opera in which Lenz has “dared” so much. And with its “madness” (that “storm in the mind”) the Pasubio theatre involved first of all the Teatro Regio, the Verdi festival. And it even caused the Conservatory to give in to the allure of the much “feared” contemporary.

Lenz's Verdi Re Lear shocked several spectators, immersed in a complexity of semiotic planes, in a sonic-visual recursion. Starting with Deleuze's two floors which manifest themselves, perhaps for the first time in the form of a scenic representation, with the two rooms in which the opera takes place simultaneously.

To answer the questions of those who have gone to the theatre – or will go in the last performances – we have thought of a small handbook. A short decalogue with some reflections and considerations on opera, collected together with Francesco Pititto –director, head of research, dramaturgy and imagoturgy of Verdi's ghost opera – on how to watch Lenz's project on stage at the 2015 Verdi Festival. And what to think about after attending the Verdi King Lear.

– “We wanted to dress a ghost: something intangible. Shakespeare. The whole and the nothing. On that ghost we built a dress made of linguistic signs, the image, the electronic music of a great international composer, the actors, the live and recorded voices, including arias and duets that belong to many of Verdi's operas. Verdi who turned Shakespeare upside down. And that he did not write a line of King Lear, but scattered this desire in many of his works”.

– “We gave body to a ghost opera by Verdi: something that the Maestro himself had already set in motion, in a concrete way, chains through which he could get closer to fulfilling that wish”.

The traces of Verdi “known” in King Lear. In The Troubadour, with Azucena, there is the drama of a female King Lear. There is the Rigoletto plot. The power of Don Carlo. The father-daughter exile of the Force of Destiny (“Me pilgrim and orphan”). The dream and nightmare of Francesco de i Masnadieri, Luisa Miller and many other fragments selected by a great connoisseur of Verdi's works, Carla DelFrate.

– “Verdi realized that King Lear was too innovative to present in Paris. So much so that he considered the Parisians ‘not ready to welcome him’, and preferred to stage Don Carlos”.

– “You have to see the Verdi King Lear as you look at a children's carousel, with horses. Each little horse is a sign, different in shape and color, a seméion. The carousel goes round and round and round we no longer see the many little horses but only one that contains them all, a single little horse that becomes the sum of all those signs”.