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Maryland lyric opera don carlo full#
Maryland lyric opera don carlo professional#

The King asks the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition how to deal with Carlo’s rebellion and is told Carlo’s death is warranted and so is Rodrigo’s for abetting the insurrection in Flanders. Philip takes Rodrigo as a confidant to also spy on Carlo and Elizabeth whom he suspects are adulterous. Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, befriends Carlo both have a commitment to helping citizens of Flanders, repressed in rule by Philip. Court Princess Eboli has designs on Carlo but then seeks revenge on him when she discovers his love of Elisabetta she plants evidence of his attachment to the Queen for the King to find. She accepts the new situation as their fate and reluctantly rebuffs Carlo. Jilted by his father, Carlo is distraught and still drawn to Elisabetta. In the interim, King Philip decided it was better for him to marry her instead. Subsequently, the two met and fell in love. Arrangements had been made for Prince Carlo of Spain to marry Princess Elisabetta of France to seal the peace between warring France and Spain. The opera’s plot in a nutshell: A monk seeming to be the deceased previous ruler, Charles V, offers foreboding words for Carlo who has just returned from Flanders where there is an uprising, a trip made against the wishes of his father, the King.

While we think of Verdi as primarily concerned with affairs of the heart, he also became a political activist, deeply concerned with governance, conflicts between kingdoms/nations, matters of church and state, and their impact on the individual. It is based on a Schiller play which itself had a forerunner in a French romance by Abbé de Saint-Réal whose plot was based on a rumor, not substantiated, that the real Don Carlos, heir to Philip’s throne was secretly in love with his stepmother it’s complicated, follow me here. Don Carlo is frequently performed in Europe, though not so often in the US for reasons I’ll get to later.ĭon Carlo is a historical drama (loosely based on real people and events) that takes place in sixteenth century Spain under the rule of King Philip II and the Spanish Inquisition. Some consider it flawed in construction despite its important and still relevant themes, but all yield to the greatness of its music. Many musicologists, though not all, view the opera as Verdi’s finest. The Metropolitan Opera recently performed Don Carlos, its first ever production of the original in French. It didn’t fare all that well, and Verdi produced several revisions, the most important and most often performed is the one for his homeland, a four-act version with the libretto translated into Italian, called Don Carlo.

What difference does an s make? Verdi and his librettists Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle originally wrote a grand, five-act opera in French for Paris titled Don Carlos (including a ballet not often performed today). This was concert opera at its fullest and then some.Īny report on a performance of Don Carlo has a lot to unpack, beginning with the question of why it is sometimes called Don Carlos. MDLO’s partially staged performance included a seventy-one piece orchestra, a twenty piece Banda, and a seventy-four member chorus, six lead soloists and eight contributing singers.

Maryland lyric opera don carlo full#

Maryland Lyric Opera gets high marks on all of these, and all three were on full display Friday night in MDLO’s showpiece production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo (1867) in concert. I love it when there is a commitment to community riding alongside the commitment to the arts. I love it when the commitment to quality is absolute.

Maryland lyric opera don carlo professional#

I love it when the professional hand is in evidence.