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Popular General Tips | Other General Tips Tips | All Tips (32) Count Luna sings of how he loves Leonora and how not even God will be able to snatch her from him -- Non pu� rapirti a me!.
After this the nuns file in to begin the ceremony, Leonora starts to take her vows, Luna interrupts and tries to abduct her. But then Manrico's men erupt onto the scene, some of them even rappelling down using ropes from the bridge at the top of the castle/refinery.
Ferrando advises Count Luna not to fight because they are completely outnumbered. So it is Manrico who takes Leonora away, even stealing Luna's boat to do so.
If you enlarge this photo you can see a video screen near the top, just right of center. This is one of two screens that show live images of the conductor and the musicians (all wearing blue shirts or blouses) of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra throughout the performance. This is especially nice in the many parts of this opera in which one of the orchestra musicians has a beautiful solo passage, so you can see them as they play.
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In the first scene of the opera, Count Luna's military commander Ferrando tries to keep his troops awake through the night by telling them about the awful things that happened here in the castle fifteen years earlier. A gypsy women was accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. Her daughter, Azucena, took revenge by stealing a baby and throwing it into the flames.
This is a dark and spooky piece of music, to set the tone for the rest of the opera. Ferrando keeps hesitating at dramatic points in the story, and the chorus comes in urging him to continue.
As I explained on my Bregenz intro page, I was not doing anything illegal by taking these photographs. All they said was no flash and no videos, and I complied with that. And I did not use any fancy equipment, just a small and unobtrusive Canon PowerShot A70 camera.
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Since the stage is completely surrounded by water, there is always the possibility that one of the hundreds of people involved in the production might fall in.
Of course they all have to know how to swim. I don't know if there is actually a swimming test, but in 2002 I was told that one of the singers had to take swimming lessons before she was allowed to set foot on the stage.
As a precaution, though, at least two trained and fully equipped divers are posted on the shore throughout each performance. Because I was sitting in the corner seat in the first row in the lower left hand corner one night, I was able to get this picture of one of the divers getting herself and her equipment into place for the evening. Leave a Comment
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At the beginning of the second act the gypsies sing their famous anvil chorus. In the Bregenz production they don't beat on their anvils but on the fence that keeps them out of the castle/refinery, the seat of wealth and power.
As in all the choral scenes at Bregenz, the people in the on-stage chorus are trained singers and are really singing Verdi's music, but their voices aren't being amplified. What we hear over the BOA (Bregenz Open Acoustics) sound system are the voices of the Moscow Chamber Chorus and the Bregenz Festival Chorus, who are singing simultaneously down in the indoor festival hall under the grandstand.
I took this photo on my second night, from my category V seat in the upper right-hand corner of the grandstand.
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At the end of the 2005 festival season they announced that nearly two hundred thousand tickets had been sold: 199,485 to be exact.
172,862 of these were tickets to the twenty-six open air performances of Verdi' Il trovatore. The rest were for the many concerts and smaller productions at various venues in Bregenz.
They say they sold 95% of the available tickets. Leave a Comment
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In the second scene of the second act, Count Luna arrives (by boat, in this production) at the convent where he intends to abduct Leonora to prevent her from becoming a nun. His old friend and military commander Ferrando is with him.
This photo, like several others in this series, was extremely dark as it originally came out. I later did a gamma correction on it, using the free software program IrfanView.
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After the singers and supernumeraries have taken their bows and left the stage, the diver who has been on standby the whole evening gathers up her equipment and climbs up the ladder.
Fortunately nobody fell into the water tonight, but she was there just in case. Leave a Comment
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At the beginning the second act the 48 meter long fence rises out of the ground, to separate the castle/refinery from the "beach" in the foreground.
The two gypsy piers are extended from the grandstand across to the stage, and soon dozens of gypsies cross and gather on the beach. Flames come out of several of the oil drums -- an eerie nighttime scene that perfectly matches Verdi's music. Leave a Comment
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In the second scene Leonora tells Ines that she is in love with a mysterious troubadour who comes to serenade her at night. This turns out to be Manrico, a gypsy who is one of Count Luna's enemies in the civil war.
Count Luna is also in love with Leonora. At the end of Act 1 he and Manrico run off to fight a duel. Later we learn that Manrico won the fight and was about to kill Luna, when a mysterious inner voice told him not to. The two fight again in a battle, and Manrico is badly wounded. Leave a Comment
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The storyline of this opera has often been criticized as turgid and illogical, ever since Verdi first composed it in 1853. But I really like what the stage director Robert Carsen has to say about it in the Bregenz program book:
"It seems to me totally mistaken to consider the libretto of Il trovatore as bad. How could it possibly be bad since it inspired such extraordinary music from its composer?"
He goes on to say:
"Opera celebrates the irrationality of the emotions, their burning destructivness and searing power. The inner world of Il trovatore is not logical, not rational. It is violent, destructive, all consuming, anarchic, nightmarish."
He points out that there are over one hundred references to fire in the libretto, which is why he decided to use so much fire on the stage. Leave a Comment
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on January 3, 2006
