A conversation between Massimo Giuseppe Bonelli  y Valerio Rocco around Trovatore, one of Giuseppe Verdi's most emblematic works.

Despite belonging to the “popular trilogy” with Rigoletto y La Traviata, Trovatore It presents many differences and seems more traditional compared to the denunciation and social criticism content of Verdi's other two masterpieces. Trovatore It is a pure melodrama, focused on the tenor-soprano-baritone love triangle, and where we cannot find a true protagonist, like Violetta or Rigoletto, because the four main characters (Manrico, Leonora, the Count, and Azucena) are perfectly symmetrical and occupy the stage for roughly the same duration and importance.

En Trovatore The protagonist is music, a continuous source of popular and refined melody at the same time, and the vision of a very nocturnal (virtually all scenes take place at night) and quite imaginary medieval Spain.

The characters are not realistic like those in TraviataAnd the image of this Middle Ages is, more than anything, an abstraction of situations and relationships between men and women, rich and poor, marginalized and powerful, that can be found at any moment in history. Unbridled passions, pride, despair, jealousy, magic, and sacrifice are the most prominent characteristics of this “last classical melodrama,” which accepts all the rules of “Belcanto” (for example, the Recitative-Aria-Cabaletta structure), but introduces for the first time atypical and novel forms of singing and expression (such as Azucena’s famous aria “Condotta ell’era in ceppi” or Leonora and the chorus’s miraculous “Miserere”), which anticipate the mature Verdi of Masked Ball o Don Carlos.

This is a new installment of the collaboration with the Teatro Real, which programs Il Trovatore from June 29 to July 20, 2026, and in which the director and director coincide againel Círculo de Bellas ArtesValerio Rocco, and the director of the Italian School of Madrid and stage director of various operas, Massimo Giuseppe Bonelli.