A theatrical performance based on the novel of the same name
BOOK YOUR FREE TICKET HERE: http://thebetrothed.eventbrite.hkDirected and performed by Massimiliano Finazzer Flory Choreography Gilda Gelati first ballerina of the ballet company of Teatro alla Scala
Music Giuseppe Verdi, Pietro Mascagni, Vincenzo Bellini, Niccolò Paganini and Luciano Berio
Performance in Italian, with English surtitles
Duration: around 75 minutes
The Betrothed: a love story, apparently…
This is the year that commemorates Giuseppe Verdi’s birth
200 years ago. In order to remember the bicentenary, the performance
will be accompanied by the composer’s music. Verdi was very upset about
Alessandro Manzoni’s death. Infact, in that occasion he wrote: “ I’m
very sorrowful about our Great’s death” and also “our holiest and purest
glory is dead with him” and he orchestrated the “Messa di Requiem”. In
1874 he directed the composition in order to remember him.
Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verdi belong to the most
important Italian Culture. They represent the Italian culture of XIX
century. The great pages of the Manzonian romance performed by
Massimiliano Finazzer Flory alternate the great Verdian scores. Verdi’s
awareness about the importance of Manzoni’s work made him the creator
of the epic conscience of the nation. The performance wants to share the
history of culture and tell something modest to the intellectuals and
something learned to the humble.
The acting are from chapters I, VI, VIII, XII, XXI, XXXIV and
XXXVIII of Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed. The challenge here is twofold:
first, to allow figures such as Don Rodrigo, Father Cristoforo, Lucia,
the Unnamed, Renzo, and the people of Milan to take centre stage, as
though characters in a Shakespearian drama, each of them struggling with
themselves first and foremost; second, to show how the language of
Manzoni, even without divine providence, to this day remains choral,
controversial, poetic, theatrical, and astonishingly relevant – indeed,
perhaps more so now than ever before.
This blend of words, dance and music teases out the golden
thread running through the novel, which is the author’s gaze –
implacable, yet at the same time implicated – through which mankind is
observed in its transformation from individual to collective, showing
the way in which the story of each of us, whether consciously or
unconsciously, is the story of us all.
The plot in a nutshell
In the seventeenth century, beneath the mountains
surrounding Lake Como in Northern Italy, a young couple on the eve of
their wedding discovers that the local tyrant has designs on the girl.
While famine and
plague decimate an exploited, oppressed people, their story takes on
Shakespearian overtones. Lucia becomes acquainted with the horrors of
abduction and imprisonment, Renzo with the anguish of condemnation and
exile. A happy ending? Possibly. But what is for sure, is that the end
of the plague, the young couple’s marriage and the merest hint of their
later life inspired a whole nation to ask questions of its present, and
imagine that different future might be possible.