For the other acts, it plans on a mixture: mostly the revisions of 1884, but with selected restorations from 1867. The Met is including Act I, as it has done since 1979. The second is the recomposed score premiered in Milan in 1884, with or without restoration of the 1867 Act I - set in France and introducing the vexed love of Don Carlos and Elisabeth of Valois. The first is the one premiered in Paris, plus or minus some pieces added or cut before and after.

Simplification may help: There are essentially two versions. The upshot: five or even more iterations of “Don Carlos” for performers to choose among today, and infinite chances for confusion in discussing them. But in his time, Verdi went in the opposite direction: cutting still more music, tweaking some of it and eventually producing a thorough (and much shorter) revision. Some of that music is significant and beautiful, and has been restored in some modern productions. (Andrew Porter, the longtime music critic of The New Yorker, was the unofficial leader of this brigade.) So when scholars got serious about “Don Carlos” a century later, they could reconstruct that cut music from handwritten orchestra parts, draft librettos, rehearsal reports and the like. One legacy of Napoleon’s civil service reforms: Parisian functionaries were trained never to throw away a piece of paper. This meant a lot of cutting under pressure. People needed time to get to the station. What took so long?īut performance start times were inflexible at 7:30 p.m., and the last trains for the suburbs left at 12:35 a.m. That changes on Monday, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin leads a new David McVicar staging of the opera, sung at last to the French libretto by Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle. The Met was the first house in the world to make “Don Carlos” standard repertory.Īnd yet the company has never performed its original words. The Metropolitan Opera has a lot to do with that: In 1950, Rudolf Bing made the bold choice to revive the work for the opening night of his first season as general manager. Today, this sprawling, packed epic - based on the tumults of 16th-century Spain under Philip II as filtered through two different plays - is part of every opera lover’s basic nutrition. Audiences saw it only sporadically almost everyone who wrote about it described an uneven “transitional” work, a troubled experiment on the eve of the composer’s final masterpieces: “Aida,” “Otello” and “Falstaff.” For the first 80 or so years of its life, Verdi’s “Don Carlos” was a problem opera on the margins of the repertory.

Don carlos met opera 2022