Emblematic production of this beginning of the opera season at the Nice Côte d’Azur Opera, the extremely rare Edgar by Giacomo Puccini, the composer’s second lyrical work whose 2024 celebrates the centenary of his death. A French premiere, presented from November 8 to 12 (a concert version captured in December 2002 on Radio France is distributed by Naïve), whose merit goes first and foremost to the director of the institution, the entrepreneur Bertrand Rossi, who decided to carry On stage is the original version of this early opera, created at La Scala in Milan in April 1889, whose score was revised several times before being condensed into three acts.
The square of a Mediterranean village, a blooming almond tree in the garden, a long rustic wooden table, the church door in the courtyard, crooked walls: a unique decoration welcomes the unfolding of the drama that unfolds in the heart of ‘ Edgar, torn between his love for the angelic and pious Fidelia, and his attraction for the fatal and sensual Tigrana, abandoned as a child by “Hungarians and Moors” and taken in by a man from the town, Franck, whose obsession she also became.
The young man with the face of a poet tried to break up with the seductress, but all it took was a provocative song with imprecatory lyrics on this Easter day and, faced with the hostile violence of the town’s inhabitants when he left the church, he decided to run away with her, not without having wounded his rival in a knife duel and destroyed his father’s house by fire.
Divided between flesh and spirit
Nicola Raab’s narrative staging, as expected, serves the sinuous plot inspired by Alfred de Musset’s poem, The cup and the lipswhich speaks of fall (debauchery and lust) and then redemption. Divided between flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, profane love and sacred love, “between Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Tannhäuser”, specifies the musicologist playwright Jean-Jacques Groleau, in the interesting program of the room, The hero’s journey, from darkness to light, exposes two polar opposite female stereotypes: possessiveness and transgression on the one hand, sacrifice and forgiveness on the other.
Tired of his decadent life, Edgar enlisted in a troop of soldiers (among them, his former adversary, Franck, Fidelia’s brother). His announced death in combat (accompanied by a false funeral and a retreat from the world under the monastic habit), his public expiatory confession as a repentant sinner, will reveal Tigrana’s greed and Fidelia’s deep attachment, alone to defend his memory. while the crowd wants to give his body to the crows. The two women, however, will pay a high price: one will be stabbed on their wedding day by the second, who will be executed by the mob.
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