ERNANI
Giuseppe VerdiOpera in four acts
Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave
based on Victor Hugo’s Hernani
Ernani, or Castilian honour: the stormy solitude of power.
Verdi’s fifth opera profiles key characters and themes which perhaps appear here in the composer’s work for the first time. Love, the core of all of them, is shown in a variety of lights, sometimes free, sometimes sublimated: natural love, alien to conventions; or forced love, unrequited, silenced. Shared love and solitary love; love for the homeland. Loves which exist marking violent borders of lights and shades in a scenario of political storms.