Aida

TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances. “This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI

Commissioned by the Viceroy of Egypt, Aida is Verdi’s only opera to be written for a non-European house. Although set in Egypt in the 19th century BC, it borrows only superficially from the current fashion for exotic subjects but on closer examination emerges as an implacable indictment of nationalism and imperialism.

Stiffelio

TUTTO VERDI – this edition to mark the Verdi bicentenary sets standards by which all similar projects will be judged. It includes all twenty-six operas by the greatest Italian stage composer, together with his immortal Requiem, all of them in definitive performances. “This is how Verdi should be played” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on TUTTO VERDI

The wife of a Protestant preacher as an adulteress – problems with the censor were inevitable from the outset with Verdi’s opera Stiffelio, which was premièred in November 1850. Even today the finale seems astonishingly bold: superficially it deals with forgiveness and reconciliation, but the orchestral writing is in such striking contrast that Verdi appears to be tolling the death knell of the protagonists’ marriage.