Der Troubadour

In the organizer's words:

Opera by Giuseppe Verdi

When Count Luna and the troubadour Manrico not only find themselves enemies in a bloody civil war, but also fall in love with the same woman, a fatal tragedy takes its course: Leonora poisons herself, Manrico is executed by Luna, who then learns that he has killed his own brother, who was believed to be missing. Manrico had grown up unrecognized with Azucena, who once had to watch old Count Luna burn her mother at the stake. Deeply traumatized, Azucena swore revenge, kidnapped the count's younger son, but accidentally killed her own child in his place.
With his drama El Trovador, Antonio García Gutiérrez wrote the most successful and popular stage work of Spanish Romanticism in 1836. Giuseppe Verdi was so inspired by the dark romance about hatred and love, jealousy and revenge that he made it the basis for his opera Il Trovatore in 1849 / 50 without a commission and thus the guarantee of a premiere. In it, he found the age-old motif of fraternal strife intertwined with the questions of fate, chance and inner necessity that always fascinated him. He knew how to carve his characters out of the bizarre story in an extremely advanced way. He ignited his musical imagination with their contradictions, their imprisonment and their longings.
In Wolfgang Nägele's new production, Il Trovatore brings an existential drama of incomparable power to the stage of the Staatsoper Hannover - a story about the power of trauma and emotional madness.