Verdi - Le trouvère (Wexford, 2025)

Giuseppe Verdi - Le trouvère

Wexford Festival Opera, 2025

Marcus Bosch, Ben Barnes, Eduardo Niave, Lydia Grindatto, Giorgi Lomiseli, Kseniia Nikolaieva, Luca Gallo, Conor Prendiville, Jade Phoenix, Philip Kalmanovitch, Vladimir Sima, Conor Cooper

O'Reilly Theatre, National Opera House, Wexford - 21st October 2025

No-one would consider Il trovatore a rarely performed opera, but the French version that Verdi reworked for the Paris Opera definitely qualifies for Wexford Festival Opera's focus on lost and scarcely known works. Being a lost and forgotten opera is no indication of lack of quality: there are many reasons why operas fall into neglect. It's a fate suffered even by many worthwhile Verdi operas and Verdi's French operas are always fascinating and all too rarely seen. That's definitely the case with Le trouvère, and Marcus Bosch's production for the festival managed to breathe a little bit of new life and meaning into a work that in its more popular Italian form has become quite stale.

In whichever version you present it however, Il trovatore is always going to be a problematic opera or at least a challenge. Aside from the overheated plot, the music has been overplayed over the years and there is a danger of it losing its impact through familiarity, or perhaps not losing its impact - since those famous arias and choruses still resound powerfully - but allowed to become too 'operatic' and detached from real human stories. Le trouvère, at the very least, provides an opportunity to hear the opera afresh, and indeed the Wexford production - for their 2025 Myths and Legends themed programme - managed to delve deeper beneath the surface storytelling and find some extra character in the work.

In comparison to some of the operas that Verdi rewrote or adapted for the Paris Opera, Le trouvère remains very much the familiar Il trovatore. With a few exceptions of course, not least the fact that the libretto was rewritten in French with suitable minor changes of music for the flow of the language, but perhaps the biggest revision or concession is of course the addition of a new 30-minute ballet sequence at the start of the third Act. In terms of musical character and plot melodrama however, Le trouvère is essentially the same as the Italian version. If you want to draw a distinction of differences between the two, there's not much new here to go on - unless you are Robert Wilson of course (but there was only one of those) - but the ballet sequence alone gives more scope to develop and establish a different character for the opera.

Director Ben Barnes rightly recognises that the medieval historical setting is hardly relevant to that, so much so that even though bringing it closer to our own time in this production to the period of the Spanish Civil War, it still has no significant impact or additional relevance, and in itself doesn't lend the opera any greater depth. Not that Le trouvère or Il trovatore needs it. It's a full-blooded melodrama, a Verdi blood and thunder melodrama, and all the impact is there in the dramatic writing, the tortured souls, the overwrought plot of hidden switched identities and fateful mistakes that take a shocking turn of events. Legends and stories should be on this kind of grand scale, but they can and should still retain the essence of humanity in them. It's there in Verdi, to some extent, and it helps if a director can find a way to bring that out.

The war context of each of the scenes is effectively staged, the images and impact of war on the people is evident, the Spanish setting well defined, but in terms of direction of the singers it was rather stiffly choreographed and all too often would fall back on opera mannerisms. A lot of this of course is 'in-built' in the opera, which amounts to a number of set pieces and star turns for the artists. Despite the strong passionate singing it was hard to feel any real human story in the fragmented structure, the stop-starting as the drama stopped to allow the singers to take their take their aria before entering back into the real (opera) world.

As good as the singing was, there was very little sense of any real interaction or drive to the love-hate drama between them. For individual performances of those classic roles however we had fine voices in Mexican tenor Eduardo Niave as Manrique and soprano Lydia Grindatto as Leonore. Giorgi Lomiseli sounded a little hesitant initially as Le Comte de Luna, but very much came into the as the drama unfolded. The most exciting performance came from Kseniia Nikolaieva's Azucena. It's a role of course designed to introduce that wildcard element of danger and unpredictability, seeking to find not so much vengeance as justice, and Nikolaieva made every one of her scenes count in raising the tensions. The rising star Irish soprano Jade Phoenix, who made a great impact in 2023 in Wexford in Marco Tutino's La ciociara, was underused as Inés but made an impression nonetheless.

There didn't appear to be much that was going to distinguish this Le trouvère from the many other productions of Il trovatore seen through the ages, but it was at the start of the third act when the inserted ballet music written by Verdi came into play and made a little more sense of it. Presenting it as a dream/nightmare of the Count, there was nothing particularly revelatory in the use of the generic Spanish Civil War footage mostly of troops marching and people on the streets, but with three dancers and some shadow play it effectively blended the human love story with the imagery of the wider war. What it captured was the weight of history, of long feuds between nations and mistrustful neighbours. It reminded you that Il trovatore or Le trouvère is not as excessive as you might think in its horror story or in the passions it evokes. Worse things happen in wartime, as the news reminds us every day now.

There are a number of Ukrainian refugees in Ireland at the moment (and scandalously on the very night I attended this performance, a mob of thugs was attacking a hotel of asylum seekers in Dublin) and many are finding success in Ireland as in the rest of Europe on the opera stage. That was the case with this opera's Azucena, Kseniia Nikolaieva, and I would imagine her own experiences and emotions would have fed into her performance. It showed. And if the production as a whole succeeded in relating those heightened Verdi rhythms, pacing and emotional overload of the brutality and suffering of war for the audience, imagine how much more it meant to the Ukrainian contingent. Without having to make any grand gestures - in an opera that usually calls out for grand gestures - Wexford's production of Le trouvère paid tribute in its own way by doing justice to those caught up in the horror of war.

External links: Wexford Festival Opera, Wexford Festival Opera Streaming on RTE Lyric FM

Verdi - Le Trouvère (Parma, 2018)

Giuseppe Verdi - Le Trouvère

Teatro Regio di Parma, 2018

Roberto Abbado, Robert Wilson, Giuseppe Gipaldi, Roberta Mantegna, Franco Vassallo, Nino Surguladze, Marco Spotti, Luca Casalin, Tonia Langella, Nicolò Donini

Dynamic, Blu-ray

Verdi's French operas have remained rare and infrequently performed. Even those originally written for a French audience, Don Carlos and Les Vêpres Siciliennes are better known in their Italian counterparts, Don Carlo and I Vespri Siciliani. Lately however not only have we been able to better assess the relative merits of those works in actual performance, but we've even been able to compare I Lombardi alla prima crociata against Jérusalem, both works rare in either language, but Verdi's French version of Il Trovatore has remained largely overlooked, and perhaps with good reason.

Notwithstanding its popularity and a number of famous choruses, Il Trovatore has pacing and plot credibility issues in its Italian version, and it's hard to imagine that it could be improved with a change of language and the insertion of a long ballet at the beginning of Act III. Any yet, watching the 2018 Verdi Opera Festival production from Parma, it's clear that Verdi's Le Trouvère is Il Trovatore like you've never heard it before. Or, perhaps more pertinently, like you've never seen it before, since Robert Wilson's characteristic direction has a way of placing a very different complexion on any familiar opera.

This is not the best place to consider the merits of Wilson's approach to theatrical presentation (Wilson makes his own arguments for it in the booklet of this BD/DVD release), but arguably they do seem better suited to works that have a more spiritual dimension rather than the full-blooded melodrama of a Verdi opera. I've rarely seen a production so beautiful but unsuited to the music and drama as Wilson's production of Verdi's Aida, and yet Wilson does unquestionably impose a huge presence and influence that colours how you perceive any opera he is involved with.

'Colour' being the operative word here. You know what to expect - a sparse light-box stage lit in shades of teal or aquamarine blue, geometric shapes floating above the stage, figures in stylised costumes contrasted against the light, striking strange static poses, with occasional objects and figures mysteriously floating past or wandering onto the stage. All this is very much present in Wilson's production of Le Trouvère which, in acknowledgement to the history of the venue and its composer, this time has the addition of some period photographs of Parma projected and animated, and one old man, looking very much like an elder Verdi, observing it all with amusement.

Even if you are familiar with Robert Wilson's designs and techniques, it still looks extraordinary, completely unlike anything else. Whether it is appropriate or not for the work ...well, it certainly doesn't look like any familiar view of this opera, but it does succeed in establishing a haunting and vaguely sinister quality that suits Il Trovatore, or Le Trouvère, very well. Whether that feeds into the musical performance or whether the French version has its own particular character is harder to determine, but why speculate and attempt to deconstruct? It is what it is, and in its totality it is utterly compelling and beguiling whether as French Verdi or as Wilson doing French Verdi.

In some ways, Wilson's cool approach - while it might not have done much for Aida - suits the overheated melodrama and wild flights of Il Trovatore and works well to tone it down and bring it into focus. It doesn't so much cool it however as show it for its true stylisation - in its own way - as a dramatic piece. The credibility of characterisation or ability to follow the machinations of Azucena the gypsy and the switched identity of Manrico (Manrique here) and his romantic attentions towards Léonore is largely irrelevant. Le Trouvère creates its own universe where anything can happen and Wilson's production makes it possible for the viewer to enter into that world.

But there are a number of clear differences and revisions that do make Le Trouvère a different prospect from Il Trovatore, and it does indeed even have a very different character sung in French instead of Italian, sounding more lyrical and less declamatory. The majority of the actual changes are small tweaks, the excision of a cabaletta here, the addition of an aria there - but there are a couple of significant changes, notably the Act III ballet and the handling of the conclusion. Whether any of these changes are noticeably for the better is doubtful but they are fascinating to hear and see performed. Unfortunately, Wilson, like nearly every other director I've seen faced with a Verdi ballet, doesn't know what to do with it, and 20 minutes or so of extras boxing - not matter how stylised - really tests even the most tolerant Wilson fan.

Despite such additions Le Trouvère thankfully doesn't aspire to grand opéra extravagance, and Wilson's slow-paced choreography and direction would never permit it anyway. Conductor Roberto Abbado recognises the more sweeping lyrical flow of the score and takes a varying approach to the pacing, never letting it head off at full-tilt but rather working with Wilson's direction to establish a piece that works on mood rather than dramatic action. Perhaps the French singing also makes a difference on the character of the work, but what matters most here - as it does with any Verdi opera in any language - is that it is superbly sung by the cast. The voices are clear and resonant Roberta Mantegna's Léonore representing that romantic lyrical quality, while Giuseppe Gipaldi's Manrique and Nino Surguladze's Azucena soar above the drama. All remain focussed on vocal character and delivery, never getting submerged by the music or indeed by the extraordinary visual aspect of the production.

It's difficult to transfer that character effectively to the screen, but the Dynamic Blu-ray release looks great. The usual transfer issues of blurring in movement are hardly noticeable in a slow Robert Wilson production, but vitally, the image gets across the subtle graduations of colour tones and lighting, with deep, rich blacks in the shadows that are essential for the contrast and the mood. It looks simply amazing in High Definition. And the audio tracks pack a punch as well. Voices are clear and resonant, there's good presence to the orchestra, although not always full detail. An impressive presentation nonetheless.

The only extra on the Blu-ray disc is a guide to the Teatro Farnese venue in Parma, but the enclosed booklet is wonderfully informative with a look at the history of the French edition of the work, including notes from Robert Wilson on his approach and a synopsis. The disc is BD50 for an almost 3 hour opera, all-region compatible, with subtitles in Italian, English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.

Links: Teatro Regio di Parma