Milan’s storied Teatro alla Scala presents Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” for its gala season premiere Saturday for the first time in 59 years, seeking to shake the opera's reputation for bringing bad luck.
The premiere is a highlight of the Milan cultural calendar, attracting top figures from the world of politics, business and the arts, although this year, both President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Giorgia Meloni have chosen instead to attend ceremonies marking the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Russian soprano Anna Netrebk o sings the role of Leonora to American tenor Brian Jagde's Don Alvaro. Jagde was brought in on short notice to substitute for German tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who dropped out for family reasons.
It is Jagde’s fourth time singing the role of Don Alvaro this year alone, and his third La Scala performance — he was previously twice brought in as a substitute alongside Netrebko in “Turandot.”
Netrebko called the score of “La Forza del Destino” a “masterpiece,” but confessed that she could not identify with her character, Leonora, ’’as a woman of the 21st century.”
“If you are looking at the story, it is basically nonsense, sorry,” she told a recent press conference. "If we are being serious and trying to follow the story, and try to understand, especially the character of Leonora, hunted by fear, guilt, desperation, and in the end what did she find?”
The opera is an ill-fated love story between Don Alvaro and Leonora set against the background of a world on the brink of apocalypse, which has resonance in current global turbulence. There was also a pro-Palestinian protest in the center of Milan just ahead of the VIP arrivals at La Scala. Unions also traditionally protest the lavish event in the piazza opposite the opera house.
Verdi’s opera has been long dogged by superstition that it brings bad luck, so much so that some in Italy will not say the full title aloud. It’s a reputation that the staging director of the La Scala production hopes to shake once and for all.
“We will be the catalyzers of good luck,’’ Leo Muscato told Corriere della Sera, adding that every production has its “accidents.”
