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.