Against Consensus

During the curtain call for the closing performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore at the Royal Opera House on 19 July, one of the cast, Danni Perry, took their bow holding a Palestinian flag. The moment, filmed by several people in the audience, went viral, with videos showing someone appearing from the wings and trying to wrest the flag from Perry’s hands. According to some reports, and Perry’s own account, the man who intervened was Oliver Mears, the director of opera. The Royal Ballet and Opera have declined to comment ‘on the personnel in the video’.

Perry’s protest would probably not have attracted so much attention if RBO personnel hadn’t tried to intervene: audience members only started filming it, according to the BBC, after a previous unsuccessful attempt to remove the flag. During the curtain calls for Khovanshchinaat the Salzburg Easter Festival this year, Simon McBurney took his bows wearing a keffiyeh – it was unclear whether the scattered boos he received were for his directorial vision or his political statement. Either way, it went unmentioned in coverage of the festival.

Perry’s action, in contrast, and the reaction to it, prompted multiple news stories. The following day, the RBO issued a statement calling the protest ‘completely inappropriate for a curtain call’ and ‘not in line with our commitment to political impartiality’. That commitment didn’t apply in 2022, when the façade of the Royal Opera House was lit in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and the Ukrainian national anthem was played before each performance. (In other countries, too, it wasn’t uncommon to see the Ukrainian flag worked into production concepts and curtain calls in the weeks following the full-scale invasion by Russia.)

‘Our goal is to act with integrity and compassion,’ an RBO representative told me in an email. ‘We must ensure that our stage remains a space for shared cultural appreciation, free from divisive political statements. Our support for Ukraine was aligned with the global consensus of the time. As the world’s geopolitics have become more complex, our stance has evolved to ensure that our actions reflect this goal.’

Mears expressed a similar view in late October 2023: ‘Russia has inflicted despicable atrocities on Ukrainians. So anyone who vocally supported that war would be persona non grata at Covent Garden. There are other situations, other wars which ignite equal passions but are more complicated. And that’s why I think there is a difference between the Ukraine war and what’s happening in the Middle East.’ (I have yet to hear this argument articulated in any of the Ukrainian cities I’ve reported from over the last two years.)

In any case, claiming political impartiality in relation to a Verdi opera is like calling Guernica a painting of a horse. True, Il trovatore is not one of the composer’s most overtly political operas, unlike Nabucco, I Lombardi or Attila. It has a famously convoluted plot, but that’s in keeping with its themes of generational trauma, ethnic cleansing and political struggle: ‘The story of the opera isn’t hard to understand,’ as Stephen Wadsworth, who directed the work in Houston last year, has written. ‘It’s what happens before the opera.’ Context is everything.

Il trovatore, set in 15th-century Spain, opens with a backstory, as told by a member of the Conte di Luna’s guard: the count’s father sentenced a Roma woman to death for bewitching his son. Her daughter, in vengeance, killed the son (the count’s brother). It’s a bloody story, told as a campfire legend that sends shivers of fear through the male chorus.

When we hear the story again, however, it’s from the daughter’s perspective. And while Azucena’s narration mirrors the jarring, convulsive rhythms of the first telling, the horror and violence depicted in the score aren’t linked to her actions or her mother’s, but to the actions taken against them. Azucena watches as her mother is beaten and burned alive without a trial or chance of defence; she is presumed guilty because of her ethnicity. Verdi’s demented, waltz-like rhythm builds towards a key plot twist: Azucena, in her hallucinatory haste to avenge her mother, kills her own baby by mistake. The man she raises as her son, Manrico, is in fact the count’s long-lost brother.

Verdi’s music shifts rapidly from violence to pathos. Azucena is a flawed but far from villainous woman. Torn between duty to her mother and her maternal love for Manrico, she is both a mourner and a mechanism of mourning – her grief ultimately leading to another generation of grief. The nobles and soldiers in the opera may be opposed to Azucena, but from this point on the audience is on her side.

Verdi composed Il trovatore in the years following the revolutions of 1848, when many enemies of the state, including Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, returned from exile to fight on the frontlines. ‘All is quiet now, but only a spark is needed to set everything in flames,’ Verdi’s contemporary Emanuele Muzio wrote to the composer’s father-in-law, Antonio Barezzi, in early 1848. (Julian Budden quotes the letter in his biography of Verdi.) The spark came a few weeks later with the Five Days of Milan, when the people drove the Austrian garrison out of the city. The last thing that Verdi, sequestered in Paris, cared about in that moment was music: ‘There is and should be only one kind of music pleasing to the ears of the Italians of 1848 – the music of the guns!’

An ardent supporter of Mazzini who had known both French and Austrian occupation, Verdi watched from France with the common diasporic feelings of helplessness and frustration. Helpless that he was unable to return and fight; frustrated at the lack of aid from the French government or support from its people. ‘Those who are not against us are indifferent,’ he wrote to Clara Maffei in August 1848. ‘The idea of a United Italy frightens these little nobodies who are in power.’ He expressed a cautious hope that Austria might give up its claim to Lombardy, aware of the potential cost: ‘Perhaps they would sack and burn everything before leaving.’

Verdi’s popularity as a composer, especially in Italy, was in part tied to the way his operas went against the global consensus. Even his least overtly political operas were subject to censorship, forcing him to relocate Rigoletto from the French court of Francis I to the duchy of Mantua, to avoid depicting, in Budden’s words, ‘the spectacle of royal profligacy in action’.

While composing Il trovatore, Verdi had several arguments with the librettist, Salvadore Cammarano, over the prominence he was giving to Azucena. As a mezzo-soprano, she wasn’t the romantic heroine but should have been a side character, underscoring the stakes of the star-crossed love story between the tenor and soprano. But Verdi fought to make her as complex a character as Rigoletto, acting with compassion if not integrity, ground out by a life where nothing is straightforward or uncomplicated.

‘I have felt quite alone trying to have these conversations with others in the industry,’ Danni Perry has said, but they aren’t alone. A few days after the Trovatore curtain call, activists with Palästina Solidarität Österreich interrupted the opening of the Salzburg Festival, waving banners, keffiyehs and the Palestinian flag. In a statement shared on the group’s website, they wrote: ‘Art must not only be critical when convenient.’