Bregenz Festival 2023: Ernani

Six years before Rigoletto, Giuseppe Verdi had already composed a gripping drama about love and revenge: Ernani – his breakthrough as a composer. The opera was also based on a play by the French author Victor Hugo, whose text inspired Verdi’s unique style with moving arias, stirring choruses and scenes of high drama: Elvira is desired by three men – among them the Spanish king and her old uncle. But she loves the robber Ernani, of all people, who has a score to settle with the king... “As much as this brilliant and precisely executed evening is always one over, it cleverly always moves just below the caricature threshold. Scurrilous drama, bizarre humour and splatter comedy serve only one thing: the unmasking of the guys.” (Münchner Merkur); “A mixture of Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ and Monty Python’s ‘The Knights of the Coconut’.” (Deutschlandfunk)